drive into the yard, if he should be quick enough.  Suddenly he thought of the dog:  that he would follow him, and of what might happen.  The dog’s chain-leash was on the table.  He stole across, got it, fastened it to the animal’s collar, and made the end secure to a staple which he had had fixed in the wall for that purpose.  As yet no intention of injury to the man except in self-defense was in his mind.  If actually attacked, he must defend himself, of course, but he wished more than anything to drive the intruder away with no collision.  That was what he hoped for.  The time went on, and the strain upon the doctor’s nerves was nearly driving him mad.  Sometimes the mare balked for hours.  He began to hope that Aaron would leave her, and return home on foot.  That would settle the matter.  But he remembered a strange trait of obstinacy in Aaron.  He remembered how he had once actually sat all night in the buggy while the mare balked.  The man balked as well as the horse.  “The damned fool,” he muttered to himself in an agony.  The dog growled in response.  Then it was that first the thought came to Gordon of what might be done to save them all.  He stood aghast with the horror of it.  He was essentially a man of peace himself, unless driven to the wall.  He was a good fighter at bay, but there was in his heart, along with strength, utter good-will and gentleness toward all his kind.  He only wished to go his way in peace, and for those whom he loved to go in peace, but that had been denied him.  He began considering the nature of the man whose dark figure remained motionless on the driveway.  He knew him from the first.  It sounded sensational, his recapitulation of his knowledge, but it was entirely true.  It was that awful truth, which is past human belief, which no man dares put into fiction.  That man out there had been from his birth a distinct power for evil upon the face of the earth.  He had menaced all creation, so far as one personality may menace it.  He was a force of ill, a moral and spiritual monster, and the more dangerous, because of a subtlety and resource which had kept him immune from the law.  He outstripped the law, whose blood-hounds had no scent keen enough for him.  He had broken the law, but always in such a way that there was not, and never could be, any proof.  There had not been even suspicion.  There had been knowledge on Gordon’s part, and Mrs. Swing’s, but knowledge without proof is more helpless than suspicion with it.  The man was unassailable, free to go his way, working evil.

Again Gordon thought he heard the nearing trot of a horse, and again the dog growled.  Gordon was not quite sure that time that a horse had not passed the house.  He told himself in despair that he could not be sure of knowing when James and Clemency came, and again the awful thought seized him, and again he reflected upon the man outside.  Suppose, instead of wearing the semblance of humanity, he had worn the semblance of a beast, then his course would have been clear enough.  Suppose it were a hungry wolf watching out there, instead of a man, and this man was worse than any wolf.  He was like the weir-wolf of the old Scandinavian legend.  He had all the cowardly cruelty of a wolf, he was a means of evil, but he had the trained brain of a man.