They led him, too dull and apathetic of spirit to resist, too indifferent of any consequence to protest, out and across his own fog-wrapped yard and down to the sledge-trail road. There in the bleak obscurity of blackness his eyes could make out a squad of silent figures, but nothing more. "Ye kain't rightly see hit yit, Hump," announced the spokesman, "but thar's a fodder-sledge standin' thar at ther aidge of ther road--an' on hit thar's somethin' thet b'longs ter ye. Hyar's a pine faggot thet's soaked with kerosene--an' hyar's matches ter light hit with--but--on pain of death--wait twell we've done gone away." Into the heavy indifference of the old man's mood flashed a sickening shaft of dread. He took the torch and the matches, and then with a cowardice that was alien to his character he stood trembling like a frightened child, while the dark figures disappeared as though they had melted. Hump Doane was afraid to kindle his torch, not afraid because of any threat to himself, but terrified for what he might see. Then he braced himself, and with his back turned, struck the match and saw the guttering flames leap greedily upon the oiled pine splinter. Slowly he wheeled, and his eyes fell on the illuminated sledge--his own sledge stolen from his barn--and there stretched lifeless, and shamefully marked with the defacement of the hangman's rope, lay what was left of his son. Old Hump Doane, who had never stepped aside from any danger, who had never known tears since babyhood, stood for a moment gulping, then the light dropped from his hand and the agony of his shriek went quavering across the silent hills and reechoed in the woods. The pine splinter burned out in the wet grass and old Hump lay beside it insensible, but after a while he awakened out of that merciful sleep and crawled on his hands and knees over to where the sledge stood, and he knelt there with his face buried on the lifeless breast. "God fergive me," he murmured with a strangled voice. "He didn't nuver hev no mammy ter raise him up aright. I reckon I failed him when he needed me most--but Bas Rowlett's accountable ter _me_!" When the neighbour woman came the next morning to prepare breakfast she fled screaming away from the gruesome sight that met her eyes: the sight of a dead man lying on a sledge, and a hunchback, who seemed dead, too, stretched unconscious across the body. It was so that men found them later, and carried them in, and it would have been more merciful had Hump Doane been as lifeless as he seemed instead of coming back to the ordeal he must face. * * * * * Through a community stunned and appalled into breathlessness the news ran like quicksilver, and the easy-pacing mule from Parish Thornton's barn was lathered with sweat as the young man called upon it to annihilate time and space over the broken ways between his house and that of his stricken friend.