She looked coldly at her questioner. “I guess it had to be,” she said. Again Bosworth felt the chill down his spine. He tried to dissipate the sensation by speaking with an affectation of energy. “Can you tell us, Mrs. Rutledge, how this trouble you speak of shows itself ... what makes you think...?” She looked at him for a moment; then she leaned forward across the rickety bead-work table. A thin smile of disdain narrowed her colourless lips. “I don’t think—I know.” “Well—but how?” She leaned closer, both elbows on the table, her voice dropping. “I seen ’em.” In the ashen light from the veiling of snow beyond the windows the Deacon’s little screwed-up eyes seemed to give out red sparks. “Him and the dead?” “Him and the dead.” “Saul Rutledge and—and Ora Brand?” “That’s so.” Sylvester Brand’s chair fell backward with a crash. He was on his feet again, crimson and cursing. “It’s a God-damned fiend-begotten lie....” “Friend Brand ... friend Brand ...” the Deacon protested. “Here, let me get out of this. I want to see Saul Rutledge himself, and tell him—” “Well, here he is,” said Mrs. Rutledge. The outer door had opened; they heard the familiar stamping and shaking of a man who rids his garments of their last snowflakes before penetrating to the sacred precincts of the best parlour. Then Saul Rutledge entered. II As he came in he faced the light from the north window, and Bosworth’s first thought was that he looked like a drowned man fished out from under the ice—“self-drowned,” he added. But the snow-light plays cruel tricks with a man’s colour, and even with the shape of his features; it must have been partly that, Bosworth reflected, which transformed Saul Rutledge from the straight muscular fellow he had been a year before into the haggard wretch now before them. The Deacon sought for a word to ease the horror. “Well, now, Saul—you look’s if you’d ought to set right up to the stove. Had a touch of ague, maybe?” The feeble attempt was unavailing. Rutledge neither moved nor answered. He stood among them silent, incommunicable, like one risen from the dead. Brand grasped him roughly by the shoulder. “See here, Saul Rutledge, what’s this dirty lie your wife tells us you’ve been putting about?” Still Rutledge did not move. “It’s no lie,” he said. Brand’s hand dropped from his shoulder. In spite of the man’s rough bullying power he seemed to be undefinably awed by Rutledge’s look and tone. “No lie? You’ve gone plumb crazy, then, have you?” Mrs. Rutledge spoke. “My husband’s not lying, nor he ain’t gone crazy. Don’t I tell you I seen ’em?” Brand laughed again. “Him and the dead?” “Yes.” “Down by the Lamer pond, you say?” “Yes.” “And when was that, if I might ask?” “Day before yesterday.” A silence fell on the strangely assembled group. The Deacon at length broke it to say to Mr. Brand: “Brand, in my opinion we’ve got to see this thing through.”