I'd never been up there at that season and I thought it was a gloomy, lonesome spot. The land rolled away with fences creeping across it like gray snakes. Here and there were clumps of woods, purplish against the sky, and between them the brown stretches of plowed land, that in the springtime would be green with the grain. Now, under those dark, low-hanging clouds with the naked trees and the bare, empty fields, it looked forlorn and dreary. It was as still as a picture, not a thing moving, but one man, someways off, walking along the top of a hill. You could see him like a silhouette, going slow, with a bundle on a stick over his shoulder, and a bit of red round his neck. When he got to the highest point he stopped and looked down on the road. He couldn't see us—the trees interfered—and he seemed, as Babbitts said, like the spirit of the landscape—sort of desolate and lonely, plodding along there, solitary and slow, between the earth and the sky. Then presently even he was gone, disappearing over the brow of the hill.
When we passed the Riven Rock Road and I could see the Firehill one, making a curving line through the country beyond, I had a creepy feeling, thinking of what had happened there eight weeks ago.
"Where's the place?" I said, almost in a whisper, and Babbitts pointed ahead with his cane.
"A little further on, where the bushes grow thick there."
Right along from the station, clumps and bunches of small trees had edged the way like a hedge. After we passed the Riven Rock Road they grew thicker, making a sort of shrubbery higher than our heads. I remembered that just before the murder men had been cutting these for brushwood and even now we passed piles of branches, dry and dead, with little leaves clinging to them like brown rags. Where the Firehill Road ran into the turnpike the growth was tangled and close, almost a small wood.
It wasn't far beyond that Babbitts pointed out the place. There was an edge of shriveled grass and on this she had been found with the branches piled over her. He drew with his cane where she had lain between the trees and the road.
"You can see just how the murderer worked," he said. "He attacked Miss Hesketh here, burst out of the darkness on her and killed her with one blow—you remember there was no sign either about her or the surroundings of a struggle—and almost immediately heard the Doctor's auto horn. We can place that by the scream the Bohemian woman heard."
"Do you think he was there when the Doctor passed?" I asked.
"Of course he was. He hadn't had time to arrange the body. That was done after the Doctor had gone by—done after the moon came out. Reddy said it was as bright as day when he got there. By that brightness the murderer did the work of concealment."
I stepped back into the mud and looked down to where the Firehill Road entered the turnpike a few yards farther on.