But there was Snake Sanders, too. Snake had been with Nat when he left home yesterday afternoon. He had returned to his own den late at night. And he was a creature who always worked stealthily, snakily, using others as his tools. In avenging his real or fancied grudge against the Bumps he had used Steve as his scapegoat. In trying to rid the neighborhood of the “detective” and gain possession of the stranger’s belongings he had employed a deadly reptile. Now he and Nigger Nat had been much together of late—and he had “some kind of a hold” on Nat. So Marion had said. It was fair to suspect, then, that he had been the instigator of this murderous attempt last night. Yes, very fair. Almost a foregone conclusion.
Yet there was no actual proof of Snake’s hand in this. For that matter, the proof against Nat himself was purely circumstantial. Another hand might have wielded this corn-hook. It was even possible that the corn-hook itself was not Nat’s, though it looked the same. Corn-hooks probably were much alike. True, this one had a whitish gouge on the handle near the blade, and the same sort of mark had been noticeable at the same spot when Nat had poised it for attack that day in his yard. But still——
“First thing I’ll do, Nigger Nat, will be to find out whether this hook is yours,” declared the man by the stove. “If it is, the next thing is to get hold of you. Then I’ll hammer the truth out of you.”
In pursuance of this program, he stoked up the fire and hastened the drying of the necessary articles of outdoor gear. When at length his personal outfit was again serviceable he went forth into the raw day.
But he did not start away at once. Memory persisted in reminding him of Uncle Eb’s account of the open door and of what he had found in the woods behind the house. He rubbed his chin, then turned and stalked toward those woods.
In under the funereal trees he passed, scrutinizing the vague dark things here and there among the trunks, finding them to be only rotting fragments of old logs, half-buried juts of stone, or lumps of forest mould. No sound came to him but the tiny impacts of falling leaves and the watery squash of his own boots on the soaked soil. Dreary and dismal stood the forest, telling him nothing of what had taken place last night. His only reward for his wandering there was a renewal of his wetness.
Swinging back, he worked by the driest route toward the road, thinking only of settling the matter of the ownership of the corn-hook. And now that he sought nothing, he found something: a grim reminder of what had come about within these shades on another night.
Under a hemlock was a sinister low mound. At one end stood a short pine board. On the board he deciphered scrawling letters shallowly cut with a jack-knife.
JAKE
DALTON
Though he had repeatedly visited these woods before, seeking fuel, he never had stumbled on this spot. Now he stood gazing thoughtfully down, hearing again Uncle Eb’s words: