He spat vigorously. "Now, this is where her seeing with other eyes than like yourn and mine comes in! And how I come to know about some things that others don't was that that very Lucinda Nelson that I married happened to be at Miss Ellice's that day. Nelsons ain't afraid of anything, and Miss Ellice had done them neighborly turns, sitting up with the sick and sharing coffee, and such as that. Anyhow, Lucinda was there, and Miss Ellice was braiding a rug and seemed extraordinarily cheerful and sunny. 'Long about two of the clock, as it were, she broke off her talk and finished her row, as it might be, without looking at it. Then she says to Lucinda--and Lucinda says she was that still and sunny, like a day that comes sometimes, that she was 'most afraid of her, just as you're 'most afraid sometimes of that kind of day, and yet you want to stay by it and it to stay by you--she says, says she, 'I'd like you to stay longer, Lucinda, but I find that I've got something to do! You go along, honey, and if I don't see you again I want you to remember that I like you and think you're on the right road!' And with that she got up and kissed Lucinda and stood in the door to watch her down the path. Lucinda went along home. Well, in about two hours, here they come, James Curdy and Mat Waters and Jonathan Morgan, and the others, drunk with whisky and with what they thought was the Word of God. They had a rope, and they meant the Dumb Child Pool." He spat again. "'Twas Jonathan Morgan that told me, and Lucinda the rest of it. He was young and wild in those days. Jonathan says he hadn't been drinking, and for all that now and then he shouted with the rest he had never seen a day so sunny and still, and just the minute after he'd shouted he'd see the whole as in a picture--his crowd and the Dumb Child's Pool, and Miss Ellice's cabin. Kind of saw it out of himself as it were, as though he was sitting on the bough of a tree looking, seeing thar as well as here. But the rest of them, I reckon, didn't see nothing but a witch and something exciting to do--unless it was James Curdy--and what he saw and felt Lord knows! Something like a nightmare, I reckon!