Bosworth said nothing. But he knew that no live woman would travel with naked feet across that freezing wilderness. Here, then, was the proof the Deacon had asked for—they held it. What should they do with it? “Supposing we was to drive up nearer—round the turn of the pond, till we get close to the house,” the Deacon proposed in a colourless voice. “Mebbe then....” Postponement was a relief. They got into the sleigh and drove on. Two or three hundred yards farther the road, a mere lane under steep bushy banks, turned sharply to the right, following the bend of the pond. As they rounded the turn they saw Brand’s cutter ahead of them. It was empty, the horse tied to a tree-trunk. The two men looked at each other again. This was not Brand’s nearest way home. Evidently he had been actuated by the same impulse which had made them rein in their horse by the pond-side, and then hasten on to the deserted hovel. Had he too discovered those spectral foot-prints? Perhaps it was for that very reason that he had left his cutter and vanished in the direction of the house. Bosworth found himself shivering all over under his bearskin. “I wish to God the dark wasn’t coming on,” he muttered. He tethered his own horse near Brand’s, and without a word he and the Deacon ploughed through the snow, in the track of Brand’s huge feet. They had only a few yards to walk to overtake him. He did not hear them following him, and when Bosworth spoke his name, and he stopped short and turned, his heavy face was dim and confused, like a darker blot on the dusk. He looked at them dully, but without surprise. “I wanted to see the place,” he merely said. The Deacon cleared his throat. “Just take a look ... yes.... We thought so.... But I guess there won’t be anything to _see_....” He attempted a chuckle. The other did not seem to hear him, but laboured on ahead through the pines. The three men came out together in the cleared space before the house. As they emerged from beneath the trees they seemed to have left night behind. The evening star shed a lustre on the speckless snow, and Brand, in that lucid circle, stopped with a jerk, and pointed to the same light foot-prints turned toward the house—the track of a woman in the snow. He stood still, his face working. “Bare feet ...” he said. The Deacon piped up in a quavering voice: “The feet of the dead.” Brand remained motionless. “The feet of the dead,” he echoed. Deacon Hibben laid a frightened hand on his arm. “Come away now, Brand; for the love of God come away.” The father hung there, gazing down at those light tracks on the snow—light as fox or squirrel trails they seemed, on the white immensity. Bosworth thought to himself: “The living couldn’t walk so light—not even Ora Brand couldn’t have, when she lived....” The cold seemed to have entered into his very marrow. His teeth were chattering.