There was darkness and the smell of damp stone and rotten mold--things ran about in the darkness on light, innumerable feet. The air was the air of a cellar that has been built underneath a well. For a moment Andrew was oddly reminded of the dairy-house on the country place that bordered the Boston road--cool even in lion-colored August with the coolness of slabs of stone buried deep in the ground. He was a tanned little boy in knee-breeches with flushed cheeks and damp hair, standing before a gleaming pan on a table and stretching out a stealthy finger through the pleasant gloom to dabble its tip in the risen cream, thick and yellow as daffodil-petals clotted together. Through the deep, barred window Summer came and the smell of it, the smell of heat and harvest and grain bursting out of the ear. Then he remembered. The little boy and the cool dairy belonged to another life which some stranger had lived in a void. This was the pit of oppression and he would lie in it like a truss of discarded hay till they took him out to hang him to an orange-tree in the bright morning, while Spanish ladies looked out from behind black fans from the jutting balconies of old houses in St. Augustine, and a curly-haired drummer-boy rattled out a dead march and then, for an instant, silenced his drum. He moved forward unsteadily, in the darkness. "Sebastian?" he called querulously, "Sebastian?" There was a stir in a corner. "I am here, my friend," said a disembodied voice. "Have they hurt you much, Sebastian?" "The knife slipped," said the voice in answer. "He was too quick. The knife slipped in my hand." Then it was silent and the running things resumed their activities. Andrew felt his way over to the corner. His outstretched hand touched a shoulder that winced beneath the touch. "Have they hurt you much?" he said again. "No," said Sebastian very bitterly. Andrew's eyes were growing accustomed to the blackness--now he saw the blur of a face. "I am well enough. But the knife was dedicated--it should not have slipped when I struck." "I fired at him point-blank," said Andrew sitting down in a puddle. "But the priming was wet. Then they hit me over the head." "You should have had a silver bullet," said Sebastian. "People like that are not killed with steel or lead."