She started forward with a convulsive gasp, and he turned aside and walked heavily out onto the porch. He stood for a moment gazing absently into the darkened valley, at the few lights of Greenstream village, the stars like clusters of silver grapes on high, ultra-blue arbors. The whippoorwills throbbed from beyond the stream, the stream itself whispered in a pervasive monotone. The first George Gordon Makimmon, resting on the porch of his new house isolated in the alien wild, had heard the whippoorwills and the stream. Gordon's father had heard them just as he, the present Makimmon, heard them sounding in the night. But no other Makimmon would ever listen to the persistent birds, the eternal whisper of the water, because he, the last, had killed his wife ... he had killed their child. He trod down the creaking steps to the soft, fragrant sod, and made his way to where a thread of light outlined the stable door. Sim was seated on a box, the lantern at his feet casting a pale flicker over his riven face and the horse muzzling the trough. Gordon sat down upon the broken chair. "She's dead," he said, after a minute. Simeon Caley made no immediate reply, and he repeated in exactly the same manner: "She's dead." A sudden bitterness of contempt flamed in the other's ineffable blue eyes. "God damn you to hell!" he exclaimed; "now you got the money and nothing to hinder you." His resentment vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He rose and picked up the lantern, and with their puny illumination they went out together into the dark. THREE I On an afternoon of the second autumn following Lettice's death Gordon was fetching home a headstall resewn by Peterman. The latter, in a small shed filled with the penetrating odor of dressed leather at the back of the hotel, exercised the additional trade of saddler. General Jackson ambled at Gordon's heel. The dog had grown until his shoulder reached the man's knee; he was compact and powerful, with a long, heavy jaw and pronounced, grave whiskers; the wheaten color of his legs and head had lightened, sharply defining the coarse black hair upon his back. October was drawing to a close: the autumn had been dry, and the foliage was not brilliantly colored, but exhibited a single shade of dusty brown that, in the sun, took the somber gleams of clouded gold. It was warm still, but a furtive wind, stirring the dead leaves uneasily over the ground, was momentarily ominous, chill. The limp rim of a felt hat obscured Gordon's features, out of the shadow of which protruded his lean, sharp chin. His heavy shoes, hastily scraped of mud, bore long cuts across the heels, while shapeless trousers, a coat with gaping pockets, hung loosely about his thin body and bowed shoulders. He passed the idlers before the office of the _Bugle_ with a scarcely perceptible nod; but, farther on, he stopped before a solitary figure advancing over the narrow footway.