He went to the spot where the intruders had been seen, but there was no trace of them, except that the wet sand bore footprints of persons who had, as she had said of them, worn boots.  He followed these footprints for some mile or more up the edge of the stream, but there he lost them from sight; they had passed on to the grass of a level place, and the dry turf, cropped by sheep to its roots, told no tales.  Near this place was a road used by cattle drivers and mules; it crossed the heather for some thousand yards, then plunged into the woods, and so went up over the hills to the town of Teramo, thirty-five kilometres away.  It was a narrow, rough, steep road, wholly unfit for vehicles of any kind more tender than the rude ox-treggia, slow as a snail, with rounds of a tree-trunk for its wheels, and seldom used except by country folks.

He would have asked Don Silverio if he had heard or seen anything of any strangers, but the priest was away that day at one of the lonely moorland cabins comprised in his parish of Ruscino, where an old man, who had been a great sinner in his past, was at his last gasp, and his sons and grandsons and great-grandchildren all left him to meet his end as he might.

It was a fine day, and they had their grain to get in, and even the women were busy.  They set a stoup of water by him, and put some in his nostrils, and shut the door to keep out the flies.  It was no use to stay there they thought.  If you helped a poor soul to give up the ghost by a hand on his mouth, or an elbow in his stomach, you got into trouble; it was safer to leave him alone when he was a-dying.

Don Silverio had given the viaticum to the old man the night before, not thinking he would outlive the night.  He now found the door locked and saw the place was deserted.  He broke the door open with a few kicks, and found the house empty save for the dying creature on the sacks of leaves.

“They would not wait!  They would not wait —­ hell take them!” said the old man, with a groan, his bony hands fighting the air.

“Hush, hush! the holy oil is on you,” said Don Silverio.  “They knew I should be here.”

It was a charitable falsehood, but the brain of the old man was still too awake to be deceived by it.

“Why locked they the door, then?  Hell take them!  They are reaping in the lower fields —­ hell take them!” he repeated, his bony, toothless jaws gnashing with each word.

He was eighty-four years old; he had been long the terror of his district and of his descendants, and they paid him out now that he was powerless; they left him alone in that sun-baked cabin, and they had carefully put his crutch out of reach, so that if any force should return to his paralysed body he should be unable to move.

It was the youngest of them, a little boy of seven years old, who had thought to do that; the crutch had hit him so often.