Doctor MacDonald had seemed about to speak again; then had turned away.

  Mr. Munn had dropped the acorn into his pocket.

  The acorn was in his pocket now. Tonight he again wore the old black coat which he had worn the night before, at the schoolhouse at Grayson’s Crossing. He reached into his pocket and felt in his fingers the small, slick, ovoidal form.

  When they turned off the pike into the lane, one of the men inquired, ‘Hadn’t we better leave the horses here?’

  ‘No,’ Mr. Munn said in an ordinary tone.

  Up the lane a dog barked, and then again, closer. Then it dashed into the open, stopped, and barked again. Its shape was vague in the darkness.

  ‘The bastard!’ one of the men exclaimed.

  Three of the men slipped off their horses, and passed their bridles to be held by others still mounted. They began to fumble on the ground beside the lane. The dog continued to bark. One of them struck a match.

  ‘Put that light out,’ Mr. Munn ordered.

  The flame went out.

  One of the men straightened up, and stepped slowly toward the dog. The other man waited. The first man held at his side a short, club-like stick which he had found. The dog barked twice, circling the man, and then ran in close and veered off. The man made no motion. He let the club hang loosely by his side. The dog again rushed in. The man took one long stride toward the dog, the club whipped over, and for an instant, the instant before the sodden crack of the impact of wood on flesh, the forms seemed to be almost merged in the darkness. Then the man swung back, and the dog, with a kind of contorted jerking of all four legs, tried to shove itself along. It tried to stand, but could not. It had not yelped, not even at the instant of the blow. The moaning sound that it now made was very similar to the moan of a human being.

  The man lifted the club and again struck. The wood cracked, breaking in half. ‘Damn!’ the man cried, ‘God damn!’ He flung the piece of broken club into the dark mass of weeds by the lane.

  The dog moaned again, and again tried to shove itself along the ground.

  ‘Can’t somebody find something?’ the man demanded fretfully.

  The other two men stirred about, feeling along the ground with their feet or bending over.

  ‘A chunk of rock, or something,’ the man said.

  ‘God damn it, it’s too dark,’ somebody exclaimed.

  The dog kept on moaning. The horses were moving restively.

  ‘We can’t stand around all night,’ another man complained.

  ‘Aw, hell!’ one of the men on the ground said in a tone of fatalistic disgust, and moved toward the dog. He withdrew his hand from his pocket. There was a faint click. The man was opening a knife. He leaned forward, over the dog, pushed the head back with one foot, thrust the blade downward and then jerked it sidewise. He straightened up, peering at the mass on the ground before him. He had cut the dog’s throat. He stepped to the side of the lane, and bent over to drive the blade of the frog-sticker into the earth, time after time, to clean off the blood. Then he shut the knife, and dropped it into his pocket.

  Somebody else had taken the dog by the hind legs and had dragged it into the weeds. The men moved up the lane, single file. The paleness of the dust of the lane was visible before them. They walked their horses on the side of the lane away from the field of tobacco. On the side by the field there were no trees or brush. On the side where they moved, a scraggly row of trees made a deeper darkness. Mr. Munn stared across at the tobacco field. It was too dark now to make out anything over there, but he thought how the spindly, miserable plants had looked and how he had felt when he saw them. Now he felt nothing.

  As they neared the end of the lane, one of the men asked in a harsh whisper, ‘Reckon has he got another dog?’

  ‘No,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘Reckon did anybody hear that barking?’ another man queried.

  ‘It’s a right smart piece up here,’ somebody said, whispering.

  ‘Better leave the horses here,’ Mr. Munn directed. And: ‘Mr. Sass, will you and Mr. Mock take charge of them?’

  The horses were led into the shadow of the thicket. The men paused, and drew together into a compact group.

  ‘Maybe we better wait and see if anybody heard that dog,’ a man whispered.

  ‘No,’ Mr. Munn said, ‘we won’t wait.’

  The men adjusted the cloths on their faces. Without further talk, two of them separated from the group, and moved off toward the rear of the house, skirting the brush along the fence. They were quickly out of sight. ‘All right,’ Mr. Munn said.

  Still in a compact group, the rest of the men moved to the gate. Mr. Munn cautiously pushed it open. The men moved across the yard toward the house, soundlessly. They pressed themselves against the walls of the house on each side of the door. A man who wore no cloth over his face but who had his hat pulled down stood directly in front of the door. He reached his hand out and struck the boards of the door. At first there was no sound from within. Then there seemed to be a stirring inside, at the window. The men pressed themselves more tightly against the wall. The position of the single man who was facing the door was in the line of vision from the window. There was a sharp movement from within. ‘Wait a minute,’ a voice said.

  The door swung slowly inward, and there the vague form of a man stood blocking the opening.

  ‘Hello,’ the unmasked man in the yard said. And at the word the man who had been crouching nearest the door thrust his foot into the aperture, jammed a pistol at arm’s length against Trevelyan’s body, and commanded, ‘Come on out!’

  Another man, pistol in hand, flung himself against the door, driving it violently from Trevelyan’s grasp.

  Trevelyan stepped slowly forward. His hands rose with a retarded, groping motion above his head.

  The woman’s voice called sharply from the interior dark, ‘Harris! Harris!’

  ‘What do you want?’ Trevelyan asked.

  ‘Come on out,’ one of the men ordered.

  The woman’s voice called, more shrilly, ‘Harris!’

  ‘Shet up!’ Trevelyan called back over his shoulder. Then, turning his head slowly toward the men, ‘What you aimen to do?’ No one answered him. He stood there, naked except for a pair of overalls hitched over one shoulder, and peered at the men. ‘What you aimen to do?’ he repeated.

  ‘Start moving,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘Kin I git my shoes?’ Trevelyan said.

  ‘Start moving,’ Mr. Munn ordered.

  They walked rapidly toward the gate, Trevelyan in front and the two men with pistols holding the muzzles against the flesh of his back. They had reached the gate when the woman called again, from the doorway now. In the darkness of the doorway, she was visible only as a blurred and unformed patch of lighter color. ‘Harris!’ she called. ‘Where you going, Harris?’

  ‘You git back,’ he told her, not turning his head.

  She came out into the yard, hesitating about halfway to the gate, and calling, ‘Harris! Harris!’

  The two men who had gone to the rear of the house came running across the yard to join the group. They passed within fifteen feet of the woman.

  ‘Tie him,’ Mr. Munn said.

  They tied Trevelyan’s hands behind him, pushed him into a saddle, and mounted. The man on whose horse Trevelyan sat got up behind another man.

  Before the last man was up, the woman ran across the yard, not toward the gate but toward the corner nearest the group, not twenty feet away. ‘Harris!’ she screamed. ‘You listen, Harris! Don’t you go, Harris!’ She was gripping the palings of the fence, leaning against them.

  Trevelyan twisted around toward her. ‘I reckin I kin take a whuppen good as the next man,’ he said.

  The last man mounted. He held the bridle of Trevelyan’s horse for a lead.

  ‘Harris!’ the woman screamed.

  ‘Shet up!’ Trevelyan said.

  The group moved down the lane at a trot. The woman ran back toward the gate as though to come out of the yard and pursue them. But she stopped at the gate. They heard her call once more.

  Some half a mile up the main pike, the horsemen took a side road. When they turned into it, Trevelyan asked. ‘Where you goen?’

  No one answered him.

  ‘What you aimen to do?’ he said. ‘Whup me?’ He looked from side to side at the cloth-covered faces of the men who rode stirrup to stirrup with him. They rode looking straight ahead, as if he had never spoken. ‘You kin whup me,’ he said, ‘but ain’t no man kin skeer me.’

  The road gradually gave way to an untraveled track over which the grass and weeds had run, covering old ruts. The horses now went forward at a walk. On each side of the track the trees grew thick and tall, so that the darkness was close between the trees like the interior darkness of a hall or corridor. But the sky was lighter now, for the clouds that had earlier concealed the stars were breaking up and drifting off toward the northern horizon. But along the lane there was no breath of wind. The leaves hung soundless and motionless.

  The lane gave abruptly upon a clearing some forty yards in diameter. In contrast with the close shadows of the lane the area seemed light and the sky very open and wide and of immeasurable depth in those spaces where no clouds were. To the left of the area and directly ahead, the woods looked black and solid. To the right the ground broke precipitously away into an abandoned quarry working. Here the track doubled back to take a shelving descent on the shallower side. It disappeared into the water that now, some fifteen yards below, filled the great cavity. The horsemen left the track and moved across the weed-grown ground toward the lip of the quarry.

  There they dismounted and tethered the horses to a fallen tree. Trevelyan stood in the middle of the group and looked from one man to another. No one looked at him. Nor did they look at each other, but off at the woods, or back at the darkness of the lane through which they had come, or across the lip of the quarry. For a moment they stood apathetically, like strangers who have waited a long time in a railway station at night or in an anteroom at a hospital.

  Then Mr. Munn commanded, ‘Cut the rope.’

  The man who had killed the dog drew the knife from his pocket and snapped open the blade. The long blade concentrated a little light to gleam dully. While the man fumbled with the rope, Trevelyan stood stock-still. Although he wore nothing but the overalls, and his bare feet were tangled in the dew-drenched grass, he did not appear to be cold. Once he shook his head and winced when the man, trying to insert the blade in the knot, twisted the rope on his wrists. Then the man made a quick, jerking motion with the knife, the same motion he had made when he killed the dog, and the rope fell to the ground.

  Trevelyan brought his hands slowly and crampedly forward. He inspected them, working the fingers and flexing the wrists. Then he let his arms fall to his sides.

  ‘Trevelyan,’ Mr. Munn said, and pointed toward the quarry, ‘you get over there.’

  Trevelyan hesitated.

  Several of the men held pistols in their hands, but loosely, pointed at the ground.

  Trevelyan moved toward the brink of the quarry. The ten men approached him in a ragged half-circle. They hesitated some twelve or fifteen feet away from him. Trevelyan glanced from man to man around him. He put his tongue out and ran it over his lips. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if’n you gonna whup me, why don’t you do hit?’

  ‘Trevelyan,’ Mr. Munn went on through the cloth of his mask, ‘it’s not a whipping.’ He went closer. ‘It’s not a whipping,’ he repeated. ‘You tried to blackmail Sorrell. You tried twice. Do you deny it?’

  ‘I ain’t sayen I did, and I ain’t sayen I didn’t,’ Trevelyan answered slowly, almost meditatively.

  Mr. Munn went closer. His head was thrust forward a little as he stared at the man who formed the center of the tightening half-circle. ‘You did,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘You took an oath and then you broke it. You were going to sell out, Trevelyan. Weren’t you, Trevelyan?’

  The man made no reply. He seemed, for the moment, to be looking across the open space toward the black woods. Mr. Munn took another step forward. He held the pistol in his hand now. In his hand it felt cold and foreign. ‘You did, Trevelyan. You went to see Sorrell again yesterday afternoon. You threatened him. He ordered you off his place, and you knocked him down. Then you telephoned that deputy and saw him and tried to make a deal with him about turning Sorrell in, but not having to testify ——’ Mr. Munn took another step. ‘Didn’t you, Trevelyan?’

  Trevelyan replied: ‘You ain’t skeeren me. Not none of you. Nor air man.’

  ‘Didn’t you, Trevelyan ——’

  ‘Go on and whup me,’ Trevelyan said.

  ‘Didn’t you, Trevelyan?’ Mr. Munn thought: I am talking to him and as long as I talk to him we will not do it, I will not do it, that’s why I’m talking to him, why don’t we go on and do it?

  He looked about him at the other men. They held pistols in their hands, but their faces were covered. It seemed to him that only the hands holding the pistols, not those blank, cloth-shrouded faces that could not be seen, were alive and real. At that moment the mask was suffocating to him. Its privacy was hideous, cutting him off from everything, from everyone. From all the world. He lifted his left hand, slowly; then, as though stifling, he tore the mask from his face, and took a long stride toward Trevelyan, and thrust out his head and called, ‘Trevelyan!’

  The man’s mouth moved without sound, then said, ‘I knowed hit was you.’

  ‘Trevelyan!’ Mr. Munn thought how sick, how afraid, how stifled, those men were under their masks. He gulped a full, deep, exquisite breath, like a man who rises from a long dive, and with burning lungs and bursting heart plunges, chest-high, into air.

  ‘And you, Trevelyan’ — and he took another stride — ‘you killed that man, you did; answer me!’

  He was almost upon him. Trevelyan moved, lifted his arm. The pistol exploded in Mr. Munn’s grasp. He swung back from Trevelyan, seeing, even in that light, the man’s narrow eyes go suddenly wide.

  Like a belated echo, another shot was fired. Who fired it, Mr. Munn did not know. Trevelyan staggered, and crossed his hands on his chest with a movement that was sad, almost womanly, humble.

  Then, there came the volley.

  Trevelyan sagged, then fell backward over the lip of the quarry.

  There was not a sound. There was nothing there in the little space before the men. Even the grass did not look trodden. It was as though nothing had been there.

  The smell of gun smoke hung on the air, sharp and cleanly like the smell of a disinfectant.

  The men let their arms, which had been outstretched, sink to their sides.

  ‘He fell over,’ somebody said in a hushed tone. It was as though he had just witnessed an accident.

  Nobody moved.

  ‘Somebody oughter look,’ a man hazarded.

  Mr. Munn tried to say, ‘I’ll do it.’ But he could not.

  One of the men approached the rim, somehow as with an air of stealth, and peered down. He returned to the group. Then he said, ‘He’s in the water.’

  Somebody remarked: ‘It’s deep there. On this side.’

  Another man walked to the rim and looked over. When he came back, he said nothing. The men got on their horses and rode slowly across the open space. The sky was lighter now, the clouds almost gone. The legs of the horses made a swishing, silken sound in the dew-damp weeds and grass; the saddles creaked a little; insects gave their small night noises, familiarly.

  My shot, Mr. Munn thought, my shot, did it hit him?

  One of the men removed the cloth that had masked his face, and stuck it into a side pocket with the easy gesture of a man who crams his handkerchief into his pocket. Mr. Munn looked at the man’s face. The other men took off their masks. Mr. Munn looked at them. Their shadowy faces were remarkable to him, the same faces, but remarkable. They were like faces a man finds on returning to the scenes of his youth, the same faces, recognizable still, but only in their astounding and reproachful difference.

  Along the overgrown track the riders strung out in single file, Mr. Munn in front. He seemed to feel the eyes of all of them fixed upon his back, pressing, grinding, boring in as with a physical pressure. He had the impulse to plunge his heels into the mare’s flanks and break into a gallop up the long dark corridor between the trees, to leave them all behind, staring; but he mastered it. Then he tried, as with the discovery of caution and cunning, not to hear the subdued sounds of their motion. He fixed his own gaze on the point, far ahead, where the dark forms of the two rows of trees converged against the sky, trying to draw the awareness of the men out of himself and delude his senses into the absolute emptiness, the loneliness, which he thought he must have.

  My shot, he thought, did it hit him? But the thought only flickered at the edge of his consciousness, like something caught out of the tail of the eye, and he put it from him, discovering, complacently and craftily, how easy, how unexpectedly easy, it was to do so if he focused all his powers upon that spot where the dark trees converged. The thought was not important, not really. He experienced a sense of release, of pleasure, at the discovery of its unimportance. The only thing important now was to fix his eyes upon that point, yonder, far up the track, and keep them fixed there. That was important.

  A short distance before the pike, after the weed-grown track had given way to the road, Mr. Munn pulled his mare to the side, and let the men come even with him. ‘Good night,’ he said, his voice having, to his own ears, a barren and croaking sound as though made by some artificial contrivance.

  ‘I thought you might spend the night at my place,’ Mr. Wyngard suggested.

  ‘No,’ Mr. Munn answered shortly. ‘I can cut through here to my road.’

  The men moved off and away from him. He watched them move away, their definite forms disintegrating into the uncertain shadows; and though solitude had, the minute before, seemed so beckoning, so desirable, he was now filled with a perverse and sudden despair, now that those forms were moving away from him.

  He rode at a trot, giving himself as completely as possible to the rhythm of the motion, the easy, lulling sounds of hoofs and leather, the anonymous, familiar closeness of the shadowed landscape. Those items belonged wholly to the moment in which he existed, a moment without affiliations with the past or the future. He tried to sink into that moment, trying to escape from time by surrendering most completely to time. He felt like a man who, in the ease of a dream, walks a wire across space, surprised that what had in waking reality seemed so impossible is so easy, but at the same time still aware that with a single misstep, a single failure in balance, he will go hurtling down to one side or the other. The immediate, ignorant moment was like that wire to him.