Jerome and Elmira dared not awake her that she might go to bed.  They sat, each at a window, staring out into the night, watching for their father, or some one to come with news that his body was found—­they did not know which.  Now and then they heard the report of a gun, but did not know what it meant.  Sometimes Elmira wept a little, but softly, that she might not waken her mother.

The moon was full, and it was almost as light as day outside.  When a little after midnight a team came in sight they could tell at once that it was the doctor’s chaise, and Jake Noyes was driving.  The boy and girl left the windows and stole noiselessly out of the house.  Jake drew up at the gate.  “You’d better go in an’ go to bed, both on you,” he said.  “We’ll find him safe an’ sound somewheres to-morrow.  There’s nigh two hundred men an’ boys out with lanterns an’ torches, an’ firin’ guns for signals.  We’ll find him with nothing wuss than a broken bone to-morrow.  We’ve dragged the whole pond, an’ he ain’t there, sure.”

Chapter III

The pond undoubtedly partook somewhat of the nature of an Eastern myth in this little New England village.  Although with the uncompromising practicality of their natures the people had given it a name so directly significant as to make it lose all poetical glamour, and render it the very commonplace of ghastliness, it still appealed to their imaginations.

The laws of natural fancy obtained here as everywhere else, although in small and homely measure.  The village children found no nymphs in the trees of their New England woods.  If there were fauns among them, and the children took their pointed ears for leaves as they lay sleeping in the undergrowth, they never knew it.  They had none of these, but they had their pond, with its unfathomable depth.  They could not give that up for any testimony of people with ropes and grappling-hooks.  Had they not sounded it in vain with farther-reaching lines?

Not a boy in the village believed that the bottom of that famous Dead Hole had once been touched.  Jerome Edwards certainly did not.  Then, too, they had not brought his father’s hat to light—­or, if they had, had made no account of it.

Some of the elders, as well as the boys, believed in their hearts that the pond had not, after all, been satisfactorily examined, and that Abel Edwards might still lie there.  “Ever since I can remember anything, I’ve heard that pond in that place ’ain’t got any bottom,” one old man would say, and another add, with triumphant conclusion, “If he ain’t there, where is he?”

That indeed was the question.  All solutions of mysteries have their possibilities in the absence of proof.  No trace of Abel Edwards had been found in the woodland where he had been working, and no trace of him for miles around.  The search had been thorough.  Other ponds of less evil repute had also been dragged, and the little river which ran through the village, and two brooks of considerable importance in the spring.  If Able Edwards had taken his own life, the conclusion was inevitable that his body must lie in the pond, which had always been reported unfathomable, and might be, after all.