Stephen struggled to regain his senses. He pulled himself up on one elbow and inspected the place where he was lying. Instantly he sprang up in disgust. The action made him acutely conscious of his ankles. They felt stiff, as if tight bands were about them. He looked down. His clean stockings bore traces of muck. Could it be that his dream was true, after all! He turned swiftly. "Ah-a!" The ejaculation was involuntary. Stephen almost swooned again as his breath gave out the sound. His whole frame began to tremble as with the palsy. A panic seized him. He would have run but that his legs refused to move. His feet seemed rooted to the ground. In that moment he felt old--ages old, as if he had lived a long time ago and had just returned to the scene where he had suffered torture and death. Mollie's sobs brought him back to a sense of reality. The nervous reaction after her heroism in confronting the monster whom she still firmly believed subsisted upon little children, and whom she would never cease to designate as "the ogre", was producing a speedy rise in the child's temperature. Her face, pale a moment ago, was now flushed and swollen with tears. She flung her arms about Stephen and implored him to take her home before the ogre killed them. He, no less miserable than herself, strove to quiet her. "He won't eat you, Mollie," the boy whispered through lips that felt stiff and parched, so difficult was it for him to make an articulate sound. "He's not an ogre. He's just a bad man. Perhaps he's crazy. I felt sorry for the pig. I didn't want him to drown it alive. I made him mad when I teased him to give it to me and let me cure it. I reckon he was just trying to scare me so I would not tease him again." Nervously the little fellow detached Mollie's clinging hands from his arm and led her, timidly and with the utmost caution, to a pile of thin, narrow oak boards about three feet long, such as are substituted very commonly in the south for shingles. They had been accumulated by Peter with a view to some day improving the roof of the old barn. Behind them the children were not in view of anyone at the house. There they sat down and Stephen wiped away the little girl's tears. "Can't we go home, Splutters--Can't we go home?" she kept repeating with such heartbreaking monotony that his natural good judgment and sound, though youthful reasoning almost yielded to her entreaties that they run away at once, before any more terrible things befell them.