Peter and Neptune, left alone, looked at each other dumbly.  A thing remained to be done.  The sun mustn’t rise upon the horror that lay in the cabin yard.  Neptune went to his small barn and trundled out a wheelbarrow, in which were several gunny-sacks, a piece of rope, and a spade.

Peter turned his head away while the old man covered the thing on the ground with sacking, rolled it over, floppily, and tied it as best he could.  The sweat came out on them both as they saw the stains that spread on the clean sacking.  Neptune heaped the bundle into his wheelbarrow.  At a word from him Peter went into the house and returned with a lighted lantern, for the River Swamp was still very dark.  The sun wouldn’t be up for an hour or two yet.  Peter held the lantern in one hand, and carried spade and shot-gun over the other shoulder.  In the ghostly light they entered the swamp, every turn and twist of whose wide, watery acreage was known to Neptune, and was fairly familiar to Peter.  They had to proceed warily, for the ground was treacherous, and at any moment a jutting tree-root might upset the clumsy barrow.  Despite Neptune’s utmost care it bumped and swayed, and the shapeless bundle in it shook hideously, as if it were trying to escape.  And the stains on the coarse shroud grew, and spread.

In a small and fairly dry space among particularly large cypresses, Neptune stopped.  At one side was a deep pool in whose depths the lantern was reflected.  About it ferns, some of a great height, grew thickly.  Neptune began to dig in the black earth.  Sometimes he struck a cypress root, against which the spade rang with a hollow sound.  It was slow enough work, but the hole in the swamp earth grew with every spade-thrust, like a blind mouth opening wider and wider.  Peter held the lantern.  The trees stood there like witnesses.

Presently Neptune straightened his shoulders, moved back to the barrow, and edged it to the hole.  Swiftly and deftly he tipped it, and the shapeless bundle slid into the open mouth awaiting it.  It was curiously still just then in the River Swamp.

When they emerged into the open, the sun was rising over a clean, fresh world.  The dark tops of the trees were gilded by the first rays.  Every bush was hung with diamonds, the young grass rippled like a child’s hair, and birds were everywhere, voicing the glory of the morning.

The old negro dropped his wheelbarrow, and lifted a supplicating face and a pair of gnarled hands to the morning sky.  His lips moved.  One saw that he prayed, trustingly, with a childlike simplicity.

Peter Champneys watched him speculatively.  He tried to reason the thing out, and the heart in his boyish breast ached with a new pain.  Thoughts big, new, insistent, knocked at the door of his intellect and refused to be denied admittance.

He thought it better to take the sheriff’s advice and stay with Neptune for a few days, but nobody troubled the good old man.  The verdict of the whole county was in his favor.  He went his harmless, fearless, laborious way unmolested.  That autumn he died, and the cabin by the River Swamp was taken over by nature, who gave it to her winds and rains to play with.  Her leaves drifted upon its floor, her birds built under its shallow eaves.