Three days passed before any living creature approached the spot,—­three days of cold unparalleled in the annals of that country,—­cold so severe that it compelled even the hardy farmers to keep as much as possible by the fireside.  On the fourth day, Isaac Welles began to think they had been quite long enough alone, and he started with a friend to visit the Blount brothers.  Arrived at the farm-house, they saw the sleigh standing before the door, but no sign of any one stirring.  The shutters of the windows were closed, and no smoke came out of the chimney.  They knocked at the door.  No answer.  Surprised at the silence, they at length tried to open it.  It was not locked, but some heavy substance barred the way.  With difficulty they forced it open wide enough to go in.

To this day those men shudder and turn pale, as they recall the awful scene that awaited them within that house, which was, in fact, a tomb.

The obstacle which opposed their entrance was the dead body of John Blount.  He lay stretched on the floor,—­his face mutilated by cuts and disfigured with gore, his clothes disordered and bloody, and one hand nearly severed from the arm by a deep gash at the wrist; yet it was evident that none of these wounds were mortal.  After that terrible conflict, he had probably crawled to the door and fallen there, faint with loss of blood; the silent, cruel cold had completed the work of death.

Following the blood-track, the two men entered the parlor, with suspended breath and hearts that almost ceased to beat.  There they found the dead body of James Blount,—­his clothes half torn off, in the violence of the strife that could end only in murder.  A long, deep cut on the throat had terminated that awful struggle, though many other less dangerous wounds showed how desperate it had been.  He lay just as he fell,—­his features still contracted with a look of defiance and hatred, and in his right hand still clasped a long, sharp knife.  He had succumbed in that mortal conflict, which quenched a lifelong quarrel, and was to prove fatal alike to victor and vanquished.  Thus the vow of John Blount was fulfilled,—­the pent-up hatred of years satisfied in his brother’s murder.

The room was in the wildest disorder,—­chairs thrown down and broken, tables overturned, and the carpet torn.  In one corner they found a second long, sharp knife.  It had been at least a fair fight.

They laid the two ghastly corpses side by side:  they had been chained together all their lives; they were chained together in death.  The two fratricides are buried in one grave.

This terrible tragedy blighted the spot where it took place.  No one would ever inhabit that house again.  The furniture was removed, except from the one room which to this day remains unchanged, and the building left to fall to decay.  The superstitious affirm, that, in the long winter nights, oaths and groans steal out, muffled, on the rising wind, from the dark shadows of the Lonely House.