"In the hills," Jesse Plum declaimed. "Yah!" He waved (Goodman Cory's) gun approximately east, toward the Pocumtuck Range. "Now he'll slay no more cattle." He set the gun down with care. "Why, he might've attackted the boys, then I couldn't never 've forgave myself, no never." Jesse lifted knotty hands defying all powers that could threaten the Cory children, and Meco began a stately shuffle, perhaps the tentative offer of a victory dance, but found himself in the wrong mood. Smiling at everyone, Jesse explained: "'S the Lord's guidance."

Father asked: "There's been cattle killed?"

Jesse was immediately hurt and sulky. "Not never again by this beast—heart-shot he be." He nodded where he thought Meco was probably standing. "Good man—whoreson good man there."

Reuben could remember seeing and hearing all that through a doorway partially filled by his mother's grace; he could remember squeezing in beside her, her arm dropping on his shoulder, her finger twisting in his hair, which he still wore quite long in those days. He could remember her bubbling with suppressed laughter. Ben was already outside, standing slim beside Father, contemplating Jesse's performance with adult gravity.

The carcass lay at some distance, and a damp east wind was blowing toward the river, but even from the first that lion had not looked right. Bloated and not bloody; flies were settling. "Oh!" Mother said—"thankful heart! It hath a—a little stink."

Meco was not as drunk as Jesse. He spread dark fingers in resignation. "Big stink," he amended, and strode off into rainy twilight, leaving Jesse to salvage what he might of glory.

So far as Reuben recalled, Meco never came back. After he had gone—but now at twelve Reuben could not bring the rest easily to mind.

Father had not found it so amusing. Jesse must have been obliged to bury the carrion and spend sober hours longing for invisibility. In following days, no doubt, whenever Jesse joined a gathering, say at the ordinary or leaning on a fence or discussing a bottle behind a shed, someone would make a soft faraway mention of catamounts, and Jesse would be surrounded by that shattering New England laughter which is performed without moving a muscle of the face or emitting any sound of any kind.

Then, within the obscurity of this last night of February, Reuben did remember more. Shame had stirred within him for Jesse Plum, who had always owned the status of a friend, old but accessible and a spinner of tales. Jesse knew everything, Reuben had once supposed—wild secret things, winds and weather signs, the enigma of women's flesh and one's own, charms against disaster, skin-prickling histories of what witches might do to cause it, and endless gaudy tales of England in the days of King Charles. If you could believe Jesse Plum—Reuben had, once—his youth before the Plague would have terrified Marlborough and made a stallion blush. Jesse could tell of monsters too—basilisk, mandrake, unicorn, sea serpent. Jesse liked to hint murkily that once during the miserable Atlantic passage to the colonies he had glimpsed a Something rising from the bowels of the deep, and never quite got around to saying what it was. He could explain the simpler stories written by furred feet in the snow, by iron bear-claws high on a tree trunk. From a blur and a spot of blood he could make you see a mouse becoming a midnight dinner for an owl, and then set your spine wriggling with a hint that maybe it was not exactly an owl but like one. For a long time—long anyway to Reuben Cory—the brothers had settled many private arguments by: "We can ask Jesse."

Drunk or no, it had not been right that a tall grown man, an old man, should act the clown. It had not felt right to watch Jesse with the dead lion when his sweating grayish face turned lost and vague and crumpled in a stupid chuckle of apology.