Uncle Seth wildly paced the room and scowled until every testy wrinkle on his face was drawn into one huge knot that centred in his forehead.
The only sounds, as Abe and I sat watching him in silence, were the thumping of his feet as he walked and the hoarse whisper of his breathing. Plainly, he was keyed up to a pitch higher than ever I had seen him.
At that moment, from far beyond the village, shrilly but faintly, came a wild burst of drunken laughter. It was a single voice and one strange to me. There was something devilish in its piercing, unrestrained yell.
"Merciful heavens!" Uncle Seth cried,—actually his hand was shaking like the palsy; a note of fear in his strained voice struck to my heart like a finger of ice,—"I'd know that sound if I heard it in the shrieking of hell; and I have not heard Neil Gleazen laugh like that in thirty years. Come, boys, maybe we can stop him before it's too late."
Thrusting his fingers through his hair so that it stood out on all sides in disorder, he wildly dashed from the room.
Springing up, Abe and I followed him outdoors and down the road. We ran with a will, but old though he was, a frenzy of fear and anxiety and shame led him on at a pace we could scarcely equal. Down the long road into town we ran, all three, breathing harder and harder as we went, past the store, the parsonage, and the church, and past the smithy, where someone called to us and hurried out to stop us.
It was the smith, who loomed up big and black and ominous in the darkness.
"They've gone," he said, "they've gone to Higgleby's barn."
"Who?" my uncle demanded. "Who? Say who! For heaven's sake don't keep me here on tenterhooks!"