“Will you go, or shall I?” asked Joe.
Greening made a show of considering it a minute.
“Well, Joe, you go on over and tell him yourself,” said he, putting on the front of generosity and confidence, “I know you won’t run off.” 124
“If I had anything to run off for, I’d go as quick as anybody, I guess,” said Joe.
“I’ll go and fetch the old lady over to keep company with Mrs. Chase,” said Sol, hurriedly striking across the road.
Joe remained standing there a little while. The growing wind, which marked the high tide of night, lifted his hat-brim and let the moonlight fall upon his troubled face. Around him was the peace of the sleeping earth, with its ripe harvest in its hand; the scents of ripe leaves and fruit came out of the orchard; the breath of curing clover from the fields.
Joe brought a horse from the barn and leaped on its bare back. He turned into the highroad, lashing the animal with the halter, and galloped away to summon Constable Bill Frost.
Past hedges he rode, where cricket drummers beat the long roll for the muster of winter days; past gates letting into fields, clamped and chained to their posts as if jealous of the plenty which they guarded; past farmsteads set in dark forests of orchard trees and tall windbreaks of tapering poplar, where never a light gleamed from a pane, where sons and daughters, worn husbandmen and weary wives, lay soothed in honest slumber; past barn-yards, where cattle sighed as they lay in the moonshine champing upon their cuds; down into swales, where the air was damp and cold, like a wet hand on the face; up to hill-crests, over which the perfumes of autumn were blowing–the spices of goldenrod and ragweed, the elusive scent of hedge orange, the sweet of curing fodder in the shock; past peace and contentment, and the ripe reward of men’s summer toil.
Isom Chase was dead; stark, white, with blood upon his beard.
There a dog barked, far away, raising a ripple on the placid night; there a cock crowed, and there another caught his cry; it passed on, on, fading away eastward, traveling 125 like an alarm, like a spreading wave, until it spent itself against the margin of breaking day.