Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/194

 It had happened years earlier before Uriah Spragg was murdered and when he still lived with his sister in the wooden house by the town dump. Shamus was about twenty years old at the time and he had been off wandering for days and was on his way home because he felt one of his visions coming on. It was dark and he had been hurrying across fields and through woods for hours when he reached Meeker's Gulch. It was a lonely marshy place overgrown with sumach and witch-hazel so dense that even stray hunters rarely penetrated it. But Shamus wasn't afraid of it. In the depths of the wild swamp he felt at home. It was only people who frightened him.

It was, too, a hot still night like the night he sat telling the story under the catalpas to Ed Hasselman and Maria Hazlett, with a red heavy August moon climbing the prairie sky. There was not a breath of air stirring, yet as Shamus penetrated the swamp he noticed an odd thing—that all the leaves of the sumach and witch-hazel, the oaks and the cottonwoods, were dancing with a gentle motion as if stirred by a gentle breeze. They kept up a faint whispering and presently he was aware of a faint perfume like that of wild honeysuckle and he began to hear snatches of faint music which seemed to come out of the very sticks and stones and the trunks of the trees. It was sweet low music like the sound of the fifes in the Grand Army parade on the Fourth of July, only it was softer and less shrill. He thought one of his visions was coming on and so he hurried, pushing his way through the thicket with such violence that most of his clothes