Warning Maud that whatever happened she was not to tell the secret, now for the first time to be told to another, May launched into her tale. On a dark night, when it was raining and when the trees shook in the wind, she had got out of bed in the Edgley house and had opened her window to behold the storm. She could not imagine what had led her to do it. It was something she had never done before. To tell the truth a voice outside herself seemed to be calling her, commanding her. Well, she had thrown up the window and had stood looking out. How the wind screamed and shrieked! Furies seemed abroad in the night. The house itself trembled on its foundations and great trees bent almost to the ground. Now and then there was a flash of lightning and she could see the whole outdoors as plain as day—“I could even see the leaves on the tree.” May had thought the world must be coming to an end but for some strange reason she was not in the least afraid. It was impossible to explain the feeling she had on that night. Well, she couldn’t sleep. Something, outside there, in the darkness, seemed to be calling, calling to her. “All of this happened more than two years ago, when I was just a young girl in school,” she explained. On that night when the storm raged May had seen, during one of the flashes of lightning, a man running desperately across the very field, where now she and Maud sat so quietly. Even from where she stood by the window in the upstairs room she could see that he was white and that his face was drawn and tired from long running. Behind him, perhaps a dozen strides behind, was another man, a giant black, with a club in his hand. In a moment May knew, she knew everything, knowledge came into her mind and illuminated it as the lightning had illuminated the scene in the field. The giant black with the club was about to kill the other man, the white man in the field. In a moment she knew she would see a murder done. The fleeing man could not escape. At every stride the black gained. There came a second flash of lightning and then the white man stumbled and fell. May threw up her hands and screamed. She had always been ashamed of the fact but why deny it—she fainted. What a night that had turned out to be! Even to speak of it made May shudder, even yet. Her father had heard her scream and came running to her room. She recovered—she sat up—in a few quick words she told her father what she had seen. Well, you see, her father and she had got out of the house somehow. They were both in their night dresses and in the woodshed back of the house her father had fumbled about and had got hold of an axe. It was the only weapon of any kind he could lay his hands on about the place. And there they were, in the darkness. No more flashes of lightning came and it began to rain. It poured. The rain came in torrents and the wind blew so that the trees seemed to be shouting to each other, calling to each other like friends lost in some dark pit.