I thought, of old Kate and her broken silence.  For once I had heard her speak.  I could feel my flesh tingle when I thought of her quick words and her hoarse passionate whisper.  She must have come into the barn while I was swimming and hidden behind the straw heap in the rear end of it and watched the edge of the woods through the many cracks in the boarding.

I knew, or thought I knew, why she took such care of me.  She was in league with the gallows and could not bear to see it cheated of its prey.  For some reason she hated the Grimshaws.  I had seen the hate in her eyes the day she dogged along behind the old money-lender through the streets of the village when her pointing finger had seemed to say to me:  “There, there is the man who has brought me to this.  He has put these rags upon my back, this fire in my heart, this wild look in my eyes.  Wait and you shall see what I will put upon him.”

I knew that old Kate was not the irresponsible, witless creature that people thought her to be.  I had begun to think of her with a kind of awe as one gifted above all others.  One by one the things she had said of the future seemed to be coming true.

When we had pulled the cart into the stable I tried to shift one of the bags of grain and observed that my hands trembled and that it seemed very heavy.

As we were going into the house the schoolmaster said: 

“Now, Mary, you take this lantern and go across the street to the house o’ Deacon Binks, the constable.  You’ll find him asleep by the kitchen stove.  Arrest his slumbers, but not rudely, and, when he has come to, tell him that I have news o’ the devil.”

“This shows the power o’ knowledge.  Bart,” he said to me when we entered the house.

I wondered what he meant and he went on: 

“You have knowledge of the shooting that no other man has.  You could sell it for any money ye would ask.  Only ye can’t sell it, now, because it’s about an evil thing.  But suppose ye knew more than any other man about the law o’ contracts, or the science o’ bridge building, or the history o’ nations or the habits o’ bugs or whatever.  Then ye become the principal witness in a different kind o’ case.  Then it’s proper to sell yer knowledge for the good o’ the world and they’ll be as eager to get it as they are what ye know about the shooting.  And nobody’ll want to kill ye.  Every man o’ them’ll want to keep ye alive.  But mind, ye must be the principal witness.”

Deacon Binks arrived, a fat man with a big round body and a very wise and serious countenance between side whiskers bending from his temple to his neck and suggesting parentheses of hair, as if his head and its accessories were in the nature of a side issue.  He and the schoolmaster went out-of-doors and must have talked together while I was eating a bowl of bread and milk which Mrs. Hacket had brought to me.

When I went to bed, by and by, I heard somebody snoring on the little porch under my window.  The first sound that reached my ear at the break of dawn was the snoring of the same sleeper.  I dressed and went below and found the constable in his coon-skin overcoat asleep on the porch with a long-barreled gun at his side.  While I stood there the schoolmaster came around the corner of the house from the garden.  He smiled as he saw the deacon.