After that—he's often told me it was only a minute or two, though if you'd asked me I'd have said it was hours—I began to look round and take notice. I heard queer sounds as if someone was groaning in pain, and saw the shrubs and grass plain by the light of two lanterns standing on the ground. Near these was a man, lit up as far as his knees, and close by him, all crumpled on the earth, another person. The lanterns threw a bright glow over the upper part of that figure, and I saw the head and shoulders, the hair with leaves and twigs in it and round the neck a red bandanna. Then I made out it was a man and that it was from him the sounds were coming—moans and groans and words in a strange language.
"What is it?" I whispered to Babbitts. "What's happened?"
And he whispered back:
"I'll tell you later. You're all right—that's all that matters now."
It was like a dream and I can only tell it that way—me noticing things in little broken bits, as if I was at the "movies" and kept falling to sleep, and then woke up and saw a new picture. The man who was standing turned round and it was Hines. He looked across the road and gave a shout and others answered it, and lights danced up and down, coming closer through the dark. Then men came running—Farmer Cresset and his sons—and behind them Mrs. Hines, with her clothes held up high and her thin legs like a stork's. I could hear them breathing as they raced up and one man's voice crying:
"It's all right, is it? There ain't been no harm done?"
After that the men were in a group talking low, the lanterns in their hands sending circles and squares of light over the bushes and the grass. Presently Farmer Cresset broke away and went to the figure on the ground. He tried to pull him up, but the man squirmed out of his hand and fell back like a meal sack, his face to the earth, the moans coming from him loud and awful.
After a while they put me on something long and hard with a bundle under my head and took me away up the road and through the woods. It was dark and no one said anything, the Cresset boys carrying what I was on and Babbitts walking alongside. As we started I heard someone say the Farmer would stay with Hines and "communicate with the authorities." And then we went swinging off under the trees, the footsteps of the men squashing in the mud. Soon there were lights twinkling through the branches, and just as I saw them and heard a dog bark, and a woman call out, my heart faded away again and that blackness swept over me.
I didn't know till afterwards how long I was sick—weeks it was—lying in Mrs. Cresset's spare room with that blessed woman caring for me like her own daughter. No people in this world were ever better to another than that family was to me. And others were good—it takes sickness and trouble to make you value human nature—for when I got desperate bad Dr. Fowler came over and took a hand. Mrs. Cresset herself told me that respecting Dr. Graham as she did, she thought I'd never have come through if Dr. Fowler hadn't given himself right up to it, staying in the house for two days the time I was worst. And not a cent would he ever take for it, only a pair of bed slippers I knitted for him while I was getting better.
It was not till I was well along on the upgrade that I heard what happened on that gruesome night. I was still in bed, sitting up in a pink flannel jacket that Anne Hennessey gave me, with the sunlight streaming in through the windows and a bunch of violets scenting up the room. Babbitts had brought them and it was he that told me, sitting in a rocker by the bedside and speaking very quiet and gentle so as not to give me any shock. For without my knowledge, just like an instrument of fate, it was I that had solved the Hesketh mystery.