One night, when June had come to her full-bosomed richness, young Pete Doane did not return to his father's house and the old hunchback's face darkened anxiously.
The warm night was a blue and moonlit glory of summer tranquillity and from the creek bottom came the full-throated chorus of the frogs. Back in the dark timber sounded the plaintive sweetness of the whippoorwills, and from everywhere drifted an intangible blending of fragrances.
But Hump sat alone and morose in the house where no one dwelt but himself and his son—save the neighbour woman who came in the daytime to cook and clean house for the widower. He sat there until midnight had passed and the moon was riding low to the west; he was still sitting in the darkness that comes before dawn, and young Pete had not yet come. Then when even June could not make gracious that dismal hour that brings fog and reek before the first gray streaks the east, the old man heard a voice outside his door and rose heavily to answer it.
He was a marked man, and should not have been so incautious, but in these days death held no threat for Hump Doane. It was life that brought him torture.
So he ignored those precepts of wariness which had been taught him by years of experience, and when he stood unarmed in the doorway, against a background of pale lamplight, he felt the thrust of a rifle muzzle against his ribs, and heard a disguised voice ordering, "Come with us."
Hump did not flinch or give back. Neither did he obey. Instead, he laughed with a hollow callousness and replied, "Shoot ef ye've a mind ter. I hain't goin' ter stir a step ter foller ye."
But masked men closed in and caught his misshapen elbows, and the voice that had first accosted him went on in the level tones of its disguise:
"We don't aim ter harm ye, Hump; leastways not yit—but we aims ter show ye somethin' we've brought ye fer a gift."
They led him, too dull and apathetic of spirit to resist, too indifferent of any consequence to protest, out and across his own fog-wrapped yard and down to the sledge-trail road.
There in the bleak obscurity of blackness his eyes could make out a squad of silent figures, but nothing more.