Arriving at the farmhouse, the peaked facade of which, built to suggest an unbegotten third story, looked more hideous than ever among the bare branches, I knocked with reddened knuckles at the door. There was no response; at last, my half-frozen hand smarting with the contact of the wood, I pushed open the door and went in. It was very still inside--a strange unnatural stillness. Even Grega and Martie, the two little plain-faced girls, were not to be seen; the drab, rose-patterned carpet muffled my footsteps, which, for some inexplicable reason, I made as light as possible. The room, faded, and scrubbed to the point of painfulness, gave only two signs of disorder, a crumpled book of verse open on the table and a Bible lying face down on the worn, orange-colored sofa. But there was something vaguely uncanny about the whole house; the very air seemed thin, like the atmosphere of approaching death. An unnameable terror took hold of me. I waited, fearing to call out. A door shut upstairs. There were footsteps, and the sound of voices,--a man's and a woman's--whispering. Then more footsteps. This time some one was taking no trouble to walk lightly. "Quietly now," the woman's voice cautioned. "Ye said it was a boy?" This was Mr. Darton's voice, unmistakable now. "I didn't say," the woman's whisper floated down to me as a door creaked open. "But it _is_--a girl. You must be ver--" Her words were cut off by the report of a door banging shut. There was the sibilant sound of a breath being drawn in and, at the same moment, Mr. Darton's voice again. "What the hell made ye think I'd want to see another _girl_ for?" he growled. A pause followed, the emptier for the preceding stridor of his voice. Then--"You c'n get along now--we ain't got no more call fur neighbors." With that he came stamping down the stairs and slouched into the front room, where, upon his catching sight of me, a frightened look crossed his face, followed, almost instantly, by a queer expression, a mixture of relief and cunning that gave his face a grotesqueness that I can recall to this very day. "Well, boy," he said in that low drawl and wavelike inflection of the voice that I was to learn to know so well, "yer father sent ye, did he?" I proffered the note and the pills, and he frowned at them a second before pocketing them. "Come--_he-re_." He seemed to pull at the words, giving each a retarded emphasis. As I approached, he drew me towards him, where he had sunk on the dingy, orange-fringed sofa. "N-ow, y're a nice young fellow--a bit scrawny, though. Ye--gotta horse?" I shook my head. "N-ow, then--ye aughtta have a h-orse. Yer pappy should see to't." His gray eyes, then almost blue against the loose brown skin of his face, held me speechless. "N-ow I gotta horse--a fine horse fur a boy. Ye might ride her--like to? Then, if yer pappy wanted, he cou'd buy her fur ye?" I looked at him in doubt.