ago he had seen that something was wrong. What, he asked the physician, was wrong? Had it to do with that miserable night out by Dargan's? He had n't pressed for knowledge. He did n't want to know Owen's proceedings, refused to talk about them, had no information at all; but what did the doctor think?

Farrar answered that he did n't know what to think. He had n't been able to find any physical cause. He added that in his own opinion "physical" was a very deep word, containing more than we thought. So it might be physical, after all.

"I suppose 'obsession' is as near to it as you can come?"

"Yes. If there was such a thing as 'possession,' I might say possession. Or vibration kindling vibration. But we have n't come to that in the medical books."

doctor kill him, put him out of it quick!

It was a dark night, powdered with stars. Outside the room ran a gallery. Farrar, stepping now and again out upon this, watched the tremendous field, then returned to Owen Adams. About two in the morning he felt a change. Leaving the room, he found Robert Adams sitting up in his library, coffee at hand.

"It's weakening," said the doctor. "I think he 'll pull out."

Back with the nephew, he stood in the gallery door watching the dawn. He heard Owen sigh and move, and was not surprised when he came to him in the doorway and whispered:

"Doctor, I feel better." A little later he said, "If ever I get out of this, I'm going to be a better man!"

Farrar long remembered the light coming up over Pleasantly. He had

"Owen came here two hours ago. My wife and I persuaded him upstairs into the spare room. He 's losing all command; people must n't see him so. Come up and do what you can. He's my brother's son. I want him un-possessed."

They went. Owen was not in bed, but dressed, seated upon a chair in the middle of the floor. He said he was in extreme agony. By now, whatever was that thing, it was working for itself outward expression. His frame was contorted, his face convulsed. The doctor did not know. He might die if this went on.

Farrar stayed there through the night and had to believe the other when he said he had been caught by pain as a dog takes a rabbit. He said he wanted to die; and would n't the

the strange things in our life. He thought of how all things are one. Anyhow, it was a dawn light that was very cool and pure and kindly.

The physician went home and slept some hours. In the afternoon he found himself upon High Street and saw before him Owen Adams coming down the old brick sidewalk. They met under the big tree before Bell's. It was a hot afternoon, a hazy, remote sky shutting all into desert glare, the leaves drooping, and the pink crapemyrtle at the end of Bell's long porch. Farrar asked:

"Well, how are you now?"

"Better; still better! It's the loveliest, quietest feeling!"

Farrar said that it had been an obsession and that it was dying out. The other answered that, anyway, he felt now like seeing his fellow-man.

Half a dozen came out of Bell's, traveling men and others, with two negroes carrying bags, and turned toward the station-the six o'clock express. Owen looked after them, then said:

"I think I'll go speak to Tom Wherry." In a moment he was walking away after the others. He had to pass the drug-store.

Farrar turned for a moment into Bell's. He had taken from the office table the Lane "Messenger" and was reading the foreign news when he heard the shots. The loungers in Bell's started up and ran out, Farrar with them. A hundred yards down the street, as though it had come up through the pavement, was a crowd under the ailantus-trees before Jim Nicholls's drug-store.

When the doctor got there, Owen Adams was dead, Jim's bullet through his heart. Jim's old six-shooter that Tom Wherry used to take from him when he was drinking, and Jim firing right and left at what he said were bloodshot eyes! When they got him down and the weapon away, he had emptied its chambers. The balls went wild, save that one that found Owen Adams. Jim Nicholls!

Early that same hot afternoon in which the loafers in Bell's heard the shots Tom Wherry wandered out of Pleasantly. He went to the thick pine-wood still standing between Choccawalla and Big Bayou. Everywhere else was heat, but in here was coolness; the ground was not thick dust, but firm and dark and cool and covered with purplish needles. He threw himself down, with his head in his arms. For a while it was a week of misery still, to-day as bad as yesterday, yesterday as bad as day before, to

as

morrow coming up as wretched as to-day, day after to-morrow wretched! Misery and wretchedness! He lay like a log in the pine-wood. Time passed; he did not know how much. Within him some one began haltingly to speak:

"I am not worth a mite! I am not worth a mite! Sorry for all I have ever done! Sorry for all I have ever done!"

It was night when he came out of the grove, and the moon was shining. It shone over Pleasantly and Cottonville and the fields and the road. Faintly, like moonlight too, entered into Tom Wherry's heart a liking for it all. Instantly the brain made words for the feeling. "The old place is n't more than half bad; it is n't so bad."

He went along the dusty road in the moonlight. It shone upon little pines and heaven-trees and where once had been a cabin, a great clump of crape-myrtle. Before him plodded a negro-Daniel, who drove one of the company teams. He caught up with him.

"Where have you been, Daniel?" Daniel had been to see old Daddy Joe Ferris, who was dying.

"He gwine make er good end-Daddy Joe. He remembers cl'ar back to creation, and he 's tellin' erbout it all to-night!"

The two men walked together.

"I've been feeling very badly, Daniel, but I'm feeling better now. It's a lovely night."

""T is that," agreed Daniel. "The Lord 's looking down. Some he takes now, and some he takes later."

Going together into Pleasantly, they heard about Owen Adams and Jim Nicholls.

The heat held over Cottonville and

Pleasantly and all the fields and roads and Jessamine and Laurie's and Big Bayou. It held around Laurie's house, and the huge trees and the long moss seemed ranged there not for shadow, but for suffocation. Moreover, it was silent, silent, silent.

Creed and Ailsy, who had been born upon the place, at last determined to break in. Creed got two or three men from the fields. After calling and calling, and only their own echoes returning, they used an ax against the thick front door. "You'd think we'd hear Canute!" In the dim hall they turned a little gray, looking at one another. Ailsy began to whimper, "I's frightened!"

They broke in the door of Laurie's

room.

"Lawd hab mercy!"

"Lawd hab mercy! He's shot Canute!"

"Lawd hab mercy! What 's dat hanging dar?"

88

Harrison Laurie was the last to live in Laurie House. A month from that day it caught fire, no one knows how, burned to the ground.

What became of Jim Nicholls? The night after he shot Owen Adams he slept or did not sleep in Magnolia County jail. In a few days there was a commission. It adjudged him crazy. The asylum at Lane.

Did he stay there? No, he did not. He got better. Some time after this, Farrar, going North, and meeting on the train Clarke, the asylum physician-in-chief, asked about him. Clarke lit his cigar and said, physician to physician, that he had never known just what was sanity, and so, naturally, had an insecure position on insanity.

Jim Nicholls? Jim was missing his drug-store, and the notion of bloodshot eyes had faded out. Also, he did n't hate as much as he had done.

That was in November. At Christmas-time Cottonville and Pleasantly heard that Jim Nicholls had escaped from Lane. They never found him. No one knows where he is. Once there came a drummer who said that he knew in Arkansas a long, red, dry man, a druggist, who had told him about this part of the world.

Tom Wherry? For another year he sold X. & Y. tickets; then he married a girl up Rangeley's way and moved into the hills. After that Cottonville and Pleasantly heard that he had become a preacher.

$9

Harrison Laurie, Owen Adams, Jim Nicholls, Tom Wherry. But there was a fifth man, and that was John Dargan.

John Dargan was a slow, country fellow, used to mornings and noons and afternoons in the fields, and twilights on his porch, with his pipe and the scarlet running bean and the gourd vine, and the whippoorwills calling, and the stars coming out, and pictures then of his childhood and boyhood, and of a year in New Orleans. Used also to his wife, her work done, coming out of house to sit there too.

All had been grief and rage and action of an unaccustomed sort for John Dargan. All was yet, he thought, grief and rage. It was twelve days from the lynching. His sister was over at Jessamine; old Matthew Dargan was lying ill and needing her. Dargan sat alone under the scarlet bean, twilight walking up the west

over the fields. His pipe lay beside His pipe lay beside him. Now and then he took it up and smoked, but in a moment put it down again and sat bent, with locked hands. His dog slept beside him on the warm, brown earth.

"Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!” "Edie! Edie! I know the kind of thing you would have said! But you are dead."

A blur came over the bayou and over the trees, but the flowers, the

"Anyhow, we burned him," said John Dargan. "He deserved burning." When he had said that he again fell silent. Sky and earth lay in dim purple, very far spread and quiet. A white star became visible, then another. Afar in the wood began a whippoorwill. "Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!"

Edie! The day they were married in the log church! Edie! "Till death do us part."

"Edie, we killed that devil-killed him slow! Edie! Edie! We did that for you, anyhow. Edie!" "Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!"

Two or three more stars came out, but still the sky spread dim rose and purple and umber, and still the fields and wood and road could be discerned.

"O God, I don't understand this world of yours! Edie! Edie! can't you speak to me?"

"Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!”

A meteor shot across the sky, the evening wind began to move, the pines smelled, the fields smelled. Very Very quietly there opened within John Dargan a picture opened like one of the homely flowers about the door: the Choccawalla, and he and his brother going fishing with Jim Lizard, long ago, when they were boys.

He tried to kill it with another picture, but it persisted, it was there. It seemed that it had as much right to be there as had the others.

house grew brighter. The zinnias, the lilies, and the sunflowers, the double row of them, grew very long and shining, and somehow they seemed no longer flat to earth. They lifted, they stretched afar, beyond the dooryard and the cotton, afar up a vast, gentle slope, like a road to heaven. He felt his wife among them. That which went out quietly, dying in the twilight, was the word "dead."

Perhaps, sitting there after a long day's work, he nodded and dreamed. Perhaps he simply became more awake. He heard her speak. Yes, it was within. He recognized that, but it was she. He cried out, within: "Edie, it is all so dark! Edie, we did that thing for you!"

She had her own trick of speech, and she did not depart from it now.

"John, don't ever say that you-all did that for me! If you 're asking me -no! no! no! What good could it do you-all or me or him or anybody? It did n't please and it did n't serve-not anything-not anybody! And as for dying, nothing dies, John. We don't do things that-a-way where I live and where I want you to live. John, let me show you-”

That is all that can be put into words; but John Dargan was simple and humble, and he learned.

John Dargan! It is probable that the zinnias and lilies and sunflowers never quite settled back again, flat to his dooryard in the cotton-fields stretching beyond it.