He had helped her to skip from rock to rock like an Alpine climber among glaciers, but when they came close to the pool glowing as an emerald of unimaginable weight, she had recoiled from it in disgust, because it seemed to her but a sheet of green scum. He explained to her that what revolted her was an almost solid field of drenched tiny leaves. But he could not persuade her to come near and admire. She hated the look of it, and when she saw a tiny water snake wriggling through it in pursuit of a frog, she fled in loathing. In the fall the leaves came down from the trees in slow spirals. They lay on the surface of the pool, which had not water enough to draw them into its plant-choked shallows. The sharpening winds swept them across the surface in little flocks. The children loved to play beside the Tarn, though Patty told them stories of Indians that had murdered and been murdered there. She whispered to RoBards that when she saw the Tarn it always hinted of suicide or assassination. The farmer, Mr. Albeson, laughed at this, but his wife, Abby—even the children called her Abby—said they was stories about the place. She had forgotten just what they was, but like as not they was dead bodies there. Folks enough had vanished during the Revolution, and maybe some of them was still laying out there waiting for Judgment Day to rouse them up. It was to this moody retreat that RoBards hurried now. He took one rail fence at a leap and landed running, like a hurdler. He stumbled and fell and was up again. Keith clambered after his father, crawled through the fence and over the rocks till he came where Immy lay bruised and stunned. Keith saw his father drop to his knees and lift the child, clench her to his breast, and shake his head over her, then raise his eyes to the sky and say something to God that the boy could not hear. The boy had always been reproached for tears and had been told, “You’re a big man now and big men don’t cry.” Yet he could see that his father was crying, crying like a little frightened girl. This strange thing twisted the boy’s heart and his features and he pushed forward to comfort his father. He was near enough to hear his sister moaning: “Papa—papa—I’m hurt—Immy’s hurt!” Before the boy could touch him, RoBards lowered Immy gently in the autumn leaves and put up his head and let out a strange sound like a wolf’s howl. Then he struggled to his feet, and ran here and there, looking, looking. He climbed one of the high boulders about the Tarn and stared this way and that; leaped down and vanished. Keith ran past Immy whimpering and struggled up the steep slab of the same boulder on all fours. Before he reached the top he could hear voices, his father’s in horrible anger, and another voice in terror. It was Jud Lasher’s voice and there was so much fear in it that Keith’s own heart froze.