Dollar would only take her hand. "You wouldn't have shot me, or any man," he assured her. "But," he added to himself among the trees, "what a fool I was to forget that they never killed women!"
It turned almost cold beside the motor in the lane; the doctor gave his boy a little brandy, and together they tramped up and down, talking sport and fiction by the small hour together. The stars slipped out of the sky, the birds began, and the same cynic shouted "Pretty, pretty, pretty!" at the top of its strong contralto. At long last there came that other sound for which Dollar had never ceased listening. And he turned back into the haunted wood with Jim Paley.
The poor nephew—still stunned calm—was as painfully articulate as a young bereaved husband. He spoke of General Dysone as of a man already dead, in the gentlest of past tenses. He was dead enough to the boy. There had been an appalling confession—made as coolly, it appeared, as Paley repeated it.
"He thought I knocked him down, and I had to let him think so! Aunt Essie insisted; she is a wonder, after all! It made him tell me things I simply can't believe.... Yet he showed me a rope just like it—meant for me!"
"Do you mean just like the one that—hanged the gardener?"
"Yes. He did it, so he swears ... afterward. He'll tell you himself—he wants to tell you. He says he first ... I can't put my tongue to it!" The lapse into the present tense had made him human.
"Like the Thugs?"
"Yes—like that sect of fiendish fanatics who went about strangling everybody they met! They were what his book was about. How did you know?"
"That's Bhowanee, their goddess, on top of his bureau, and he has Sleeman and all the other awful literature locked up underneath. As a study for a life of sudden idleness, in the depths of the country, it was enough to bring on temporary insanity. And the strong man gone wrong goes and does what the rest of us only get on our nerves!"
Dollar felt his biceps clutched and clawed, and the two stood still under more irony in a gay contralto.