"Please don't miscall our town," interrupted Gird. "Well, Doctor, I agree to a final séance, as you call it. But I'm going to be present." Zoberg made a gesture as of refusal, but I sided with Gird. "If this is to be my test, I want another witness," I told Zoberg. "_Ach!_ If it is a success, you will say that he helped to deceive." "Not I. I'll arrange things so there will be no deception." Both Zoberg and Gird stared at me. I wondered which of them was the more disdainful of my confidence. Then Susan Gird joined us, and for once I wanted to speak of other subjects than the occult. _3. "That Thing Isn't My Daughter----"_ It was Zoberg who suggested that I take Susan Gird for a relaxing drive in my car. I acclaimed the idea as a brilliant one, and she, thanking me quietly, put on an archaic-seeming cloak, black and heavy. We left her father and Zoberg talking idly and drove slowly through the town. She pointed out to me the Devil's Croft of which I had heard from the doctor, and I saw it to be a grove of trees, closely and almost rankly set. It stood apart from the sparser timber on the hills, and around it stretched bare fields. Their emptiness suggested that all the capacity for life had been drained away and poured into that central clump. No road led near to it, and I was obliged to content myself by idling the car at a distance while we gazed and she talked. "It's evergreen, of course," I said. "Cedar and a little juniper." "Only in the hedge around it," Susan Gird informed me. "It was planted by the town council about ten years ago." I stared. "But surely there's greenness in the center, too," I argued. "Perhaps. They say that the leaves never fall, even in January." I gazed at what appeared to be a little fluff of white mist above it, the whiter by contrast with the black clouds that lowered around the hill-tops. To my questions about the town council, Susan Gird told me some rather curious things about the government of the community. There were five councilmen, elected every year, and no mayor. Each of the five presided at a meeting in turn. Among the ordinances enforced by the council was one providing for support of the single church. "I should think that such an ordinance could be set aside as illegal," I observed. "I think it could," she agreed, "but nobody has ever wished to try." The minister of the church, she continued, was invariably a member of the council. No such provision appeared on the town records, nor was it even urged as a "written law," but it had always been deferred to. The single peace officer of the town, she continued, was the duly elected constable. He was always commissioned as deputy sheriff by officials at the county seat, and his duties included census taking, tax collecting and similar matters. The only other officer with a state commission was the justice; and her father, John Gird, had held that post for the last six years.