“I have committed my own little murder in my day. I am human, too. I am not innocent because of any incapacity for crime. My respectable reputation is due to my discretion, not to any flaccidity of character.” Months would go by with no onset of this publishing instinct. Then it would sweep over him like a vertigo. Hearing Keith tell of the tender root that broke through the aqueduct, he understood how even stone and mortar must eventually yield to the intolerable nagging of a weak thing that never rested. He rose and with a laborious pretense of dawdling sauntered to the door, out and around the house to where the tulip tree stood. As if idly, he leaned against the trunk and studied the sprawl of the roots. Some of them were thicker than a young tree. They writhed and contorted the ground. Standing still like pythons petrified, they yet seemed to move with a speed the more dreadful for its persistence. Glaciers were not more leisurely, nor more resistless. The roots dived into the earth, some of them bent upon reaching the foundation walls. They had but one instinct, the hunt for water, and nothing could check them but death. Down the outside stairway of the cellar went RoBards and stumbling in the dark found the wall nearest the tree and passed his hands along it like a blind man. His anxious fingers encountered tendrils pleached against the rough masonry. He made a light and found that the tulip tree was already within the walls. The roots were like worms covered with mould. On the cellar floor was a dust of old mortar, and bits of it slowly shoved out from between the chinks. Some of the dislodged mortar was no older than the night when he had lifted out stones and buried Jud Lasher somewhere inside there and smeared fresh mortar in the crevices. Terrified by the peril of this secret inquiry of the far-delving roots, he went back to the outer air. Either he must be surrendered to exposure or the tree must be executed. The life of such a tree if let alone was far beyond the human span. The strength of it was uncanny. He stood a while, as motionless as the roots, charmed by their snaky spell. Then an idea came to his rescue. He called to Albeson, who was puttering about the yard in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’s with his collar off for comfort. “See those roots,” said RoBards. “They’re going to tip the house over if we don’t kill them. Get your saw and ax and we’ll cut them off now.” “No special hurry as I can see,” said Albeson. “We’ll get it over with to-day.” “In spite of its bein’ the Sabbath?” Albeson protested, making religion an excuse for laziness. “The better the day the better the deed.” Albeson condensed the Declaration of Independence into a grumbling dissent, then fetched the tools. All afternoon they worked, chopping, digging, sawing, until they had severed all the Briarean arms on the side next the house. “Looks like we’ve killed the old tree,” Albeson groaned. “It’ll naturally bleed to death.”