We walked down the hill, and I took Mary on the motor-cycle behind me as far as Lennox's, leaving Herrick to follow on foot. Dick was better. He had passed a feverish night, Lennox said, but the fever had left him with dawn and he was in an exhausted but normal sleep when we arrived. I left Mary with him, and walked back along the road to meet Herrick. "And now," I said, "tell me--tell me the whole thing. Jack, what was it?" We were near the old twisted cedar by the hollow, the tree by which Aaron had met his death that spring. Herrick sat down on a boulder by the roadside and began to scrape slowly at his pipe. "I told you about Menning and his wild-man stunt--all that I found out the other day. Menning had a criminal twist and he knew how to turn that trick to his own ends. It is far easier to simulate the grotesque--the superhuman, if you like--than most people suppose. Isn't that, after all, the basis of the witch-doctors' power? Even an ordinary man becomes horrible if you put a mask on him. And remember that Menning had a streak of abnormality to start with, and the thing may very easily, as I said, have become an obsession with him. Anyway that's the best explanation one can put on it, and the one that Lennox and our friend Sliefer, and Lessing himself, will agree upon. After all, it pretty well covers the facts." I remembered his words the night before. "Then what did you mean about the dawn?" Herrick was silent a moment. "We're all well out of a bad business, Austin," he said then. "Don't you think we'd better let it go at that?" "But you had another theory. You had it that morning, after the fire. You wouldn't tell me what it was. But I don't imagine you've changed your mind altogether." "No, I didn't change my mind," Herrick said. He put his hand into his pocket. When he withdrew it there lay, on his palm, the little battered silver button that Lennox had first shown us. "You remember, Austin," he said, "that I recalled one or two facts to your mind that evening. This was One of them. I want you to look at it again." "It is a button," I said. "A button such as you find on some European peasants' costumes." "Westphalian peasants, such as Menning's mother came from. Lennox overlooked that fact, though as the button is badly defaced we can excuse him. I'll help you out, Austin. It is of pure silver, very soft, and it has been hammered to form a rough bullet that could be fired from an old-fashioned muzzle-loading gun." "I don't see how that helps you." "I want you to think," he said, "what particular associations there are with a silver bullet." I stared at the little pellet in my hand, striving with some vague recollection at the back of my mind. "They were used against ... against ... some sort of witchcraft," I said at last. "I don't see----" "They were used against lycanthropy," said Herrick.