To look at Joseph Sikes you would never believe that he could be afraid of anything or anybody. He was a burly, rugged, middle-aged man with broad shoulders, a battling face and a thick shock of black hair that might well have supplied you with a corporeal picture of what Samson must have looked like before he was shorn. He looked somewhat ill at ease and uncomfortable in his Sunday suit of clothes and his starched shirt and the bothersome collar that appeared to be giving him a great deal of trouble, judging by the frequency with which he ran his forefinger around the inside of it and twisted his puckered, uplifted chin from time to time as if in dire need of help. Mr. Sikes was an unmarried man. He was not used to tight collars. The combination sitting-and dining-room was on the side of the house facing the main thoroughfare of the town. Its windows looked out across the porch and down the wooded slope to the street, a hundred yards away. Mr. Sikes on his arrival after a scant supper at his boarding-house in Shiveley’s Lane had found the entire lower part of the house in darkness except the kitchen. He took it upon himself to light the two kerosene lamps in the sitting-room and subsequently—in some dismay—to draw down the window shades. He replenished the fire from a scuttle of coal and then, on second thought, went down into the cellar and replenished the scuttle. After performing these small chores, he removed his overcoat and hat and hung them over the back of a chair alongside the stove. He forgot to remove his goloshes, and it was not until he became aware of the smell of scorching rubber that he remembered where he had put them on sitting down for the second time in front of the stove. He had put them on the bright nickel-plated railing at the bottom of the base-burner with only one thought in mind: to get his feet warm. He was aghast. That odor of calamity was bound to ransack the house from bottom to top, with desolating consequences. Mary would think the house was afire, Oliver would lose his head completely, Serepta would—and the child? It didn’t take much to suffocate a baby. Mr. Sikes was not long in deciding what to do. He opened a window, jerked off the offending goloshes, and hurled them far out into the snowdrifts. It was while he was in the act of disposing of the damning evidence that he heard the kitchen door slam with a bang. Somewhere back in his mind lurked an impression that some one had been knocking at the front door during the tail end of his profound cogitation. He had a faint, dim recollection of muttering something like this to himself: “You can knock your fool head off, far as I’m concerned.”