"Do you suppose Menning kept something shut up there?" "If he did, where was it when he opened the door? I tell you the shed was empty." "There was no trapdoor?" "I went back to see. I didn't just give it up, either. I went back a few days later, one time when Menning had passed our house and I knew he'd be away on his rounds some time. I saw the old woman. She was surly in a way, but friendly to me. You see, I'd tended her before when Menning had been beating her up--oh, yes, he'd done that more than once to my knowledge. The Nevills knew it, but there was no good interfering; she'd deny it, and no one dared tackle Menning. But she had to come to me, once, and though she put up some story, I could tell what had happened. Well, I chatted with her there, and just to see what she'd say I asked her if they didn't keep some sort of a dog on the place. She said no, that they'd had a dog and her son shot it because it howled at night. After a while I left her settled there in the kitchen and before I left I took my chance to go over every hole and corner out of doors. Except for the cow and a couple of pigs there wasn't the sign of any animal round the place bigger than a cat. And there was no opening in that shed except the window and the door Menning came out by. "So now you know the whole thing--all Mary Lessing claimed I was keeping back from you--and I imagine you're about as wise as I am, and that isn't much." "Why didn't you tell us sooner?" I asked. "What could I do? If I went telling that around anyone would have a right to say I was crazy and that I'd imagined the whole thing. You might say--and I've tried to think myself--that what I heard was just something running in the bushes and what I saw was an old hen fluttering in at the window. And maybe it was. And I've known men who've been just as startled, and have told circumstantial tales, over nothing more." "You could have told it at its face value." "No," said Lennox, "I couldn't. My mind doesn't work that way. I've got to weigh things. And I've got to exhaust every possible reasonable explanation, including my own physical state at the time, before I'll admit that a thing is so when I know it can't be so. If I've kept this to myself it's because I wanted to find some sort of explanation in my own mind first." He faced me, stolid and obstinate. Even in that moment I admired his self-possession, his dogged, common sense determination not to be drawn into admission of the existence of any thing that, as Lessing said, he couldn't stick a pin into and label. And I knew, too, that it had cost him something to tell me that story. "Well," I said, "that's only one more to the list of things we don't seem able to clear up. There's one point; that whatever the explanation may be, it all seems to centre, in the end, round Menning himself."