I called no more. I crept along the path, spying ahead. Turning the second bend I saw the Flaxpatch road wiggling clay ruts toward the creek ford. Elders plagued my sight. I came suddenly upon the marking stick. It was no stick at all; it was a full-grown locust blossoming leaves. It slanted out of the creek where it was first driven. And where it grew Grandpa Middle-ton had fallen, and his life had hurried like a bird startled on a nest.

Grandma wasn’t in sight, and it came to me then where she had gone. She had taken the jug of water to Uncle Jolly herself, not wanting to wake me as I slept under the bubby bush. But I had no time to think of this, for two men came riding from Flaxpatch way. They stood in stirrups as the beasts picked hoofs down steep places. I hid, peeping from the elders. Their faces were strange. One fanned himself with a hat. The horses’ flanks were lathery with sweat. And behind them, a little bull of a man came walking. He wore a mine cap with carbide lamp atop. Thick his chest was, and a fleece of black hairs curled out of his shirt.

I stepped from the elders and he spied me. “Be dom,” he said, and stopped. “Trying to skeer a feller?” He wiped a sleeve over his face. He took off his cap, and his head was clean as a shaven jaw.

“Now, no,” I said. I looked at his double ankles, and his double thumb joints.

“Be dom,” he said. “I thought pine-blank you was a mountycat about to spring.” He laughed, the flesh of his face catching into a hard knot. “Be dom,” he said again, and walked the footlog. In a moment he was gone.

“I bet Walking John Gay never looked odd as that feller,” I said to myself. “I never saw John Gay, but I’ve seen a man strange as ever lived.” I thought of how I would tell Uncle Jolly and Grandma about him. I spoke the words aloud to know their sound.

“A feller not five feet high come along, and I skeered him proper. A low-standing feller.

“Oh, he was a little keg of a man, round and thick and double jinted.

“A mountycat he thought I was, fixing to spring.

“‘Be dom,’ he kept a-saying.”

I would tell of this little fist of a man, never speaking of the locust tree. Never a word of how it grew, tall now and shaggy with leaves.

I turned down the creek, going back the way I had come, going from this death place as from a new grave. I looked back once.

“Brother, now farewell,” I said.