Horace Gooch was going to bed. He had had a hard day, and it was nine o’clock. He had a notion he was not likely to sleep very well. The sheriff of the county had telephoned earlier in the evening—in fact, he was at supper—that a body had been found in one of the marsh pools. The news rather took his appetite away. He had a weak and treacherous stomach to begin with, and the mere thought of going over to Rumley in the morning to see if he could identify the grewsome object caused him to suddenly realize that he had a much weaker stomach than he had ever suspected before. He had, besides, an absurd notion that he was going to be haunted all night long by the ghastly remains of his brother-in-law. While he always had contended that Oliver Baxter did not have much of a head to speak of, the fact that it had been split wide open with an ax or something of the sort was very likely to cause him to see things even with his eyes closed and the bedroom in pitch darkness. He decided to leave the light burning in his room, and then, after further deliberation, concluded, that as long as it had to be lit anyway it would be a very sensible thing on his part if he were to put in the time reading instead of wasting electricity. Mr. Gooch slept in a night-shirt. He didn’t believe in new-fangled things. He was a plain man. No frills for him. The windows of his bedroom looked out on to an extensive lawn, formerly a rather pretentious and well-kept half-acre but now unkempt, weedy and in a state of dire neglect. Mr. Gooch had cunningly allowed his yard to fall into a sort of groveling, imploring decrepitude, indicative of poverty rather than parsimony. He wanted the voters to understand that he was by no means as rich as the unprincipled opposition said he was. He regarded it as a very telling piece of political strategy. Before retiring to the large four-poster bed—which, now that he was a widower, seemed needlessly commodious and would have been disposed of long ago but for a thrifty far-sightedness that took into consideration the possibility that he might get married again—before retiring, he peeped out between the window curtains to see whether the arc light was burning at the street corner above. It was, and he experienced a singular sensation of relief. Then he put on his spectacles and got into bed. He had a book, a well-worn copy of “David Harum,” but he did not begin reading at once. He was thinking of the many dark and lonely nights old Oliver Baxter had spent in Death Swamp. It gave him a creepy feeling. He tucked the covers a little more tightly under his chin—but still the creepy feeling persisted.