"Oh dear, oh dear, I wisht I was home!" sobbed Carl; but he started to run to Gertie's protection.

The Black Dutchman set down the lamp. "_Wer ist da?_ I see you!

d.a.m.nation!" he roared, and lumbered out, seizing a pitchfork from the manure-pile.

Carl galloped up to Gertie, panting, "He's after us!" and dragged her into the hazel-bushes beyond the corn-crib. As his country-bred feet found and followed a path toward deeper woods, he heard the Black Dutchman beating the bushes with his pitchfork, shouting:

"Hiding! I know vere you are! _Hah!_"

Carl jerked his companion forward till he lost the path. There was no light. They could only crawl on through the bushes, whose malicious fingers stung Gertie's face and plucked at her proud frills. He lifted her over fallen trees, freed her from branches, and all the time, between his own sobs, he encouraged her and tried to pretend that their incredible plight was not the end of the world, whimpering:

"We're a'most on the road now, Gertie; honest we are. I can't hear him now. I ain't afraid of him--he wouldn't dast hurt us or my pa would fix him."

"Oh! I hear him! He's coming! Oh, please save me, Carl!"

"Gee! run fast!... Aw, I don't hear him. I ain't afraid of him!"

They burst out on a gra.s.sy woodland road and lay down, panting. They could see a strip of stars overhead; and the world was dark, silent, in the inscrutable night of autumn. Carl said nothing. He tried to make out where they were--where this road would take them. It might run deeper into the woods, which he did not know as he did the Arch environs; and he had so twisted through the brush that he could not tell in what direction lay either the main wagon-road or the M. & D.

track.

He lifted her up, and they plodded hand in hand till she said:

"I'm awful tired. It's awful cold. My feet hurt awfully. Carl dear, oh, plea.s.sssse take me home now. I want my mamma. Maybe she won't whip me now. It's so dark and--ohhhhhh----" She muttered, incoherently: "There! By the road! He's waiting for us!" She sank down, her arm over her face, groaning, "Don't hurt me!"

Carl straddled before her, on guard. There was a distorted ma.s.s crouched by the road just ahead. He tingled with the chill of fear, down through his thighs. He had lost his stick-saber, but he bent, felt for, and found another stick, and piped to the shadowy watcher:

"I ain't af-f-fraid of you! You gwan away from here!"

The watcher did not answer.

"I know who you are!" Bellowing with fear, Carl ran forward, furiously waving his stick and clamoring: "You better not touch me!" The stick came down with a silly, flat clack upon the watcher--a roadside boulder. "It's just a rock, Gertie! Jiminy, I'm glad! It's just a rock!... Aw, I knew it was a rock all the time! Ben Rusk gets scared every time he sees a stump in the woods, and he always thinks it's a robber."

Chattily, Carl went back, lifted her again, endured her kissing his cheek, and they started on.

"I'm so cold," Gertie moaned from time to time, till he offered:

"I'll try and build a fire. Maybe we better camp. I got a match what I swiped from the kitchen. Maybe I can make a fire, so we better camp."

"I don't want to camp. I want to go home."

"I don't know where we are, I told you."

"Can you make a regular camp-fire? Like Indians?"

"Um-huh."

"Let's.... But I rather go home."

"_You_ ain't scared now. _Are_ you, Gertie? Gee! you're a' awful brave girl!"

"No, but I'm cold and I wisht we had some tea-biscuits----"

Ever too complacent was Miss Gertrude Cowles, the Good Girl in whatever group she joined; but she seemed to trust in Carl's heroism, and as she murmured of a certain chilliness she seemed to take it for granted that he would immediately bring her some warmth. Carl had never heard of the romantic males who, in fiction, so frequently offer their coats to ladies fair but chill; yet he stripped off his jacket and wrapped it about her, while his gingham-clad shoulders twitched with cold.

"I can hear a crick, 'way, 'way over there. Le's camp by it," he decided.

They scrambled through the brush, Carl leading her and feeling the way. He found a patch of long gra.s.s beside the creek; with only his tremulous hands for eyes he gathered leaves, twigs, and dead branches, and piled them together in a pyramid, as he had been taught to do by the older woods-faring boys.

It was still; no wind; but Carl, who had gobbled up every word he had heard about deer-hunting in the north woods, got a great deal of interesting fear out of dreading what might happen if his one match did not light. He made Gertie kneel beside him with the jacket outspread, and he hesitated several times before he scratched the match. It flared up; the leaves caught; the pile of twigs was instantly aflame.

He wept, "Jiminy, if it hadn't lighted!..." By and by he announced, loudly, "I wasn't afraid," to convince himself, and sat up, throwing twigs on the fire grandly.

Gertie, who didn't really appreciate heroism, sighed, "I'm hungry and----"

"My second-grade teacher told us a story how they was a' arctic explorer and he was out in a blizzard----"

"----and I wish we had some tea-biscuits," concluded Gertie, companionably but firmly.

"I'll go pick some hazelnuts."

He left her feeding the flame. As he crept away, the fire behind him, he was dreadfully frightened, now that he had no one to protect. A few yards from the fire he stopped in terror. He clutched a branch so tightly that it creased his palm. Two hundred yards away, across the creek, was the small square of a lighted window hovering detached in the darkness.

For a panic-filled second Carl was sure that it must be the Black Dutchman's window. His tired child-mind whined. But there was no creek near the Black Dutchman's. Though he did not want to venture up to the unknown light, he growled, "I will if I want to!" and limped forward.

He had to cross the creek, the strange creek whose stepping-stones he did not know. Shivering, hesitant, he stripped off his shoes and stockings and dabbled the edge of the water with reluctant toes, to see if it was cold. It was.

"Dog-gone!" he swore, mightily. He plunged in, waded across.

He found a rock and held it ready to throw at the dog that was certain to come snapping at him as he tiptoed through the clearing. His wet legs smarted with cold. The fact that he was trespa.s.sing made him feel more forlornly lost than ever. But he stumbled up to the one-room shack that was now shaping itself against the sky. It was a house that, he believed, he had never seen before. When he reached it he stood for fully a minute, afraid to move. But from across the creek whimpered Gertie's call:

"Carl, oh, _Carl_, where are you?"

He had to hurry. He crept along the side of the shack to the window.

It was too high in the wall for him to peer through. He felt for something to stand upon, and found a short board, which he wedged against the side of the shack.

He looked through the dusty window for a second. He sprang from the board.

Alone in the shack was the one person about Joralemon more feared, more fabulous than the Black Dutchman--"Bone" Stillman, the man who didn't believe in G.o.d.

Bone Stillman read Robert G. Ingersoll, and said what he thought.

Otherwise he was not dangerous to the public peace; a lone old bachelor farmer. It was said that he had been a sailor or a policeman, a college professor or a priest, a forger or an embezzler. Nothing positive was known except that three years ago he had appeared and bought this farm. He was a grizzled man of fifty-five, with a long, tobacco-stained, gray mustache and an open-necked blue-flannel shirt.

To Carl, beside the shack, Bone Stillman was all that was demoniac.

Gertie was calling again. Carl climbed upon his board and resumed his inspection, seeking a course of action.

The one-room shack was lined with tar-paper, on which were pinned lithographs of Robert G. Ingersoll, Karl Marx, and Napoleon. Under a gun-rack made of deer antlers was a cupboard half filled with dingy books, shotgun sh.e.l.ls, and fishing tackle. Bone was reading by a pine table still littered with supper-dishes. Before him lay a clean-limbed English setter. The dog was asleep. In the shack was absolute stillness and loneliness intimidating.

While Carl watched, Bone dropped his book and said, "Here, Bob, what d'you think of single-tax, heh?"

Carl gazed apprehensively.... No one but Bone was in the shack.... It was said that the devil himself sometimes visited here.... On Carl was the chill of a nightmare.