Page:Post - Uncle Abner (Appleton, 1918).djvu/104

 point of land, swallowed what it got. A lost swimmer in that deadly water was sometimes found miles below, months later—or, rather, a hideous, unrecognizable human flotsam that the Hills accepted for the dead man.

The means, too, were not without the indication Dabney had given in his wild talk to my uncle. Besides, the negroes had seen a figure—or more than one—at dusk, about an abandoned tobacco house beyond the great meadow on the landward side of Highfield.

It was a tumble-down old structure in a strip of bush between the line of the meadow and the acres of morass beyond it—called swamps in the South. It was ghost land—haunted, the negroes said; and so what moved there before the tragedy, behind the great elm at the edge of the meadow, old Clayborne had seen only at a distance, with no wish to spy on it.

Was it the inevitable irony of chance that Dabney scouted the river with his glass while the thing he feared came in through the swamps behind him?

By the time my uncle and Randolph had got these evidences assembled the liquor had steadied Charlie. At first he pretended to know nothing at all about the affair. He had not wakened, and had heard nothing until the cries of old Mariah filled the house with bedlam.

Randolph said he had never seen my uncle so profoundly puzzled; he sat down in old Charlie's room, 91