Finally he became sure that his father was nowhere in the clearing, and he raised his voice again and shouted, and hallooed, and listened, and hallooed again, and got no response.

Suddenly a chill seemed to strike Jerome’s heart.  He thought of the pond.  Little given as he was to forebodings of evil, when once he was possessed of one it became a certainty.

“Father’s fell in the pond and got drowned,” he burst out with a great sob.  “What will mother do?”

The boy went forward, stumbling half blindly over the stumps.  Once he fell, bruising his knee severely, and picked himself up, sobbing piteously.  All the child in Jerome had asserted itself.

Beyond the clearing was a stone wall that bounded Abel Edwards’s property.  Beyond that was a little grove of old thick-topped pine-trees; beyond that the little woodland pond.  It was very shallow in places, but it never dried up, and was said to have deep holes in it.  The boys told darkly braggart stories about this pond.  They had stood on this rock and that rock with poles of fabulous length; they had probed the still water of the pond, and “never once hit the bottom, sir.”  They had flung stones with all their might, and, listening sharply forward like foxes, had not heard them “strike bottom, sir.”

One end of this pond, reaching up well among the pine-trees, had the worst repute, and was called indeed a darkly significant name—­the “Dead Hole.”  It was confidently believed by all the village children to have no bottom at all.  There was a belief current among them that once, before they were born, a man had been drowned there, and his body never found.

They would stand on the shore and look with horror, which yet gave somehow a pleasant titillation to their youthful spirits, at this water which bore such an evil name.  Their elders did not need to caution them; even the most venturesome had an awe of the Dead Hole, and would not meddle with it unduly.

Jerome climbed over the stone wall.  The land on the other side belonged to Doctor Prescott.  He went through the grove of pine-trees and reached the pond—­the end called the Dead Hole.  He stood there looking and listening.  It was a small sheet of water; the other shore, swampy and skirted with white-flowering bushes and young trees, looked very near; a cloying, honey sweetness came across, and a silvery smoke of mist was beginning to curl up from it.  The frogs were clamorous, and every now and then came the bass boom of a bull-frog.  A red light from the westward sun came through the thin growth opposite, and lay over the pond and the shore.  Little swarms of gnats danced in it.