"I think that Aaron had already determined that night, unknown to their mother, to put an end to the whole thing; that he went out to seek his half-brother at the time, and under that form, when alone it would be possible to bring himself to do that which he felt had to be done. Jakey must have suspected. There was a struggle between the two, and it was Aaron who was killed, before he had time to use the silver bullet which he dropped, there, in the moment of unexpected attack. The old mother must have known the truth; through all her horror and superstition her love for her first son survived, and together they concocted the story of Aaron's absence with the wagon. That she paid bitterly, many times over, for her impulse, there is no doubt. She was now completely under Jakey's dominion--the dominion of a being little better than a monster, whom she dared not now denounce, for who would have believed her story? "It is certain that what we saw last night is what attacked Lessing, and had attacked him previously. It reached him through the skylight, but not altogether as he thought. It climbed. You will remember that in every instance the attack was from overhead." "But the thing that... that I touched..." I cried. "It was _furry_! It----" I stopped short, taken with a sudden shudder. "I know," said Herrick. "I had hoped," he went on, "that you didn't retain any very definite impression. That's why----" "_You_ saw it." "We all saw something. We thought we did." "And Sliefer..." I paused. "Herrick, there was something else. I remember now. You were holding me. And you told Sliefer not to fire. I wondered..." "They say there is a change, one way or another, at the moment of death," Herrick said. "I knew it. I tried to stop him." He paused a moment. "I was too late. That's all." We sat there for a moment, not speaking. Then Herrick knocked his pipe out against the boulder and rose to his feet. "Come on back to the house. Mrs. Searle will have breakfast for us, and we both look rather a wreck!" He laid a hand on my shoulder. "Take my advice, Austin, and put this whole thing out of your mind. I told you in the beginning--there's the other explanation; why not stand by it? As I say, it covers all the facts. The rest is between us three. Look at it how you will, whatever happened last night happened for the best." I remembered the thing that had cried and twisted on the ground, and was silent. Herrick was right. As soon as Lessing was able to travel we went down, the three of us, to the little cottage on the Sound which they had rented for the remainder of the fall. Herrick came down for an occasional long week-end, and it was during one of these, when we were lounging out on the beach before supper, that he handed me without comment a little cutting from a Pennsylvania local paper.