The golden man seemed to have no arms. He looked out over the crowd and then looked down, looked right at Samuel. The picture was clear, lighted and perfect. The man’s eyes had no depth—they were not like other eyes, not like the eyes of a man.

Suddenly there was quick movement on the platform, and Samuel’s father put both his hands on the boy’s head so that his palms cupped over the ears and his fingers met behind. The hands forced Samuel’s head down and forced his face tight in against his father’s black best coat. Struggle as he would, he could not move his head. He could see only a band of light around the edges of his eyes and only a muffled roar of sound came to his ears through his father’s hands. He heard heartbeats in his hears. Then he felt his father’s hands and arms grow rigid with set muscles, and against his face he could feel his father’s deep-caught breathing and then deep intake and held breath, and his father’s hands, trembling.

A little more there was to it, and he dug it up and set it before his eyes in the air ahead of the horse’s head—a worn and battered table at a pub, loud talk and laughter. A pewter mug was in front of his father, and a cup of hot milk, sweet and aromatic with sugar and cinnamon, before himself. His father’s lips were curiously blue and there were tears in his father’s eyes.

“I’d never have brought you if I’d known. It’s not fit for any man to see, and sure not for a small boy.”

“I didn’t see any,” Samuel piped. “You held my head down.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“What was it?”

“I’ll have to tell you. They were killing a bad man.”

“Was it the golden man?”

“Yes, it was. And you must put no sorrow on him. He had to be killed. Not once but many times he did dreadful things—things only a fiend could think of. It’s not his hanging sorrows me but that they make a holiday of it that should be done secretly, in the dark.”

“I saw the golden man. He looked right down at me.”

“For that even more I thank God he’s gone.”

“What did he do?”

“I’ll never tell you nightmare things.”

“He had the strangest eyes, the golden man. They put me in mind of a goat’s eyes.”

“Drink your sweety-milk and you shall have a stick with ribbons and a long whistle like silver.”

“And the shiny box with a picture into it?”

“That also, so you drink up your sweety-milk and beg no more.”

There it was, mined out of the dusty past.

Doxology was climbing the last rise before the hollow of the home ranch and the big feet stumbled over stones in the roadway.

It was the eyes, of course, Samuel thought. Only twice in my life have I seen eyes like that—not like human eyes. And he thought, It’s the night and the moon. Now what connection under heaven can there be between the golden man hanged so long ago and the sweet little bearing mother? Liza’s right. My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day. Let me dig this nonsense out, else I’ll be searching that poor child for evil. This is how we can get trapped. Now think hard and then lose it. Some accident of eye shape and eye color, it is. But no, that’s not it. It’s a look and has no reference to shape or color. Well, why is a look evil then? Maybe such a look may have been sometime on a holy face. Now, stop this romancing and never let it trouble again—ever. He shivered. I’ll have to set up a goose fence around my grave, he thought.