“There’s no use your staying here.”

The resonance of the deep voice jarred through the woods.  The broad shoulders twitched.  One of the hairy hands made a half circle.

“I hope you’ll clean this up, my boy.  You ought to replace the stones and trim the graves.  You couldn’t blame them, could you, if these old people were restless and tried to go abroad?”

For Bobby, in spite of himself, the man on whose last shelter the earth continued to fall became once more a potent thing, able to appraise the penalty of his own carelessness.

“Come,” Katherine whispered.

But Bobby lingered, oddly fascinated, supporting the ordeal to its final moment.  The blows of the backs of the spades on the completed mound beat into his brain the end.  The workmen wandered off through the woods.  From a distance the harsh voice of one of them came back: 

“I don’t want to dig again in such a place.  People don’t seem dead there.”

Robinson tried to laugh.

“That man’s wise,” he said to the doctor.  “If Paredes spoke of this cemetery as being full of ghosts I could understand him.”

The doctor’s deep bass answered thoughtfully: 

“Paredes is probably right.  The man has a special sense, but I have felt it myself.  The Cedars and the forest are full of things that seem to whisper, things that one never sees.  Such things might have an excuse for evil.”

“Let’s get out of it,” Robinson said gruffly.

Katherine withdrew her hand.  Bobby reached for it again, but she seemed not to notice.  She walked ahead of him along the path, her shoulders a trifle bent.  Bobby caught up with her.

“Katherine!” he said.

“Don’t talk to me, Bobby.”

He looked closer.  He saw that she was crying at last.  Tears stained her cheeks.  Her lips were strange to him in the distortion of a grief that seeks to control itself.  He slackened his pace and let her walk ahead.  He followed with a sort of awe that there should have been grief for Silas Blackburn after all.  He blamed himself because his own eyes were not moist.

Back of him he heard the murmuring conversation of the doctor and the district attorney.  Strangely it made him sorry that Robinson should have been more impressed than Howells by the doctor’s beliefs.

They stepped into the clearing.  The wind had dissipated the smoke shroud.  It was no longer low over the roofs.  Against the forest and the darker clouds the house had a stark appearance.  It was like a frame from which the flesh has fallen.

The black wagon had gone.  The Cedars was left alone to the solution of its mystery.

Paredes, Graham, and Rawlins waited for them in the hall.  There was nothing to say.  Paredes placed with a delicate accuracy fresh logs upon the fire.  He arose, flecking the wood dust from his hands.

“How cold it will be here,” he mused, “how impossible of entrance when the house is left as empty as the woods to those who only go unseen!”