“That evening he spoke again, on the porch, twisting his hands exactly as if he were making bread. He repeated that he wanted me to be nice to him. He said something wrong would happen if I pushed him to it.
“I think if he had threatened to kill me it would have been more possible than his hints and sobs. The thing went along for a month, then six weeks, and nothing more happened. I started again and again to tell them at the store, two miles back in the pines, but I could never get away from Nicholas; he was always at my shoulder, muttering and twisting his hands.
“At last I found something.” She hesitated, glancing once more down through the empty gloom, while her fingers swiftly fumbled in the band of her waist.
“I was cleaning his room—it simply had to be done—and had out a bureau drawer, when I saw this underneath. He was not in the house, and I took one look at it, then put the things back as near as possible as they were. I was so frightened that I slipped it in my dress—had no chance to return it.”
He took from her unresisting hand a folded rectangle of coarse grey paper; and, opening it, found a small handbill with the crudely reproduced photograph of a man’s head with a long, drooping nose, sleepy eyes in thick folds of flesh, and a lax under-lip with a fixed, dull smile:
WANTED FOR MURDER!
The authorities of Coweta offer THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS for the apprehension of the below, Iscah Nicholas, convicted of the murder of Elizabeth Slakto, an aged woman.
General description: Age about forty-eight. Head receding, with large nose and stupid expression. Body corpulent but strong. Nicholas has no trade and works at general utility. He is a homicidal maniac.
WANTED FOR MURDER!
“He told me that his name was Nicholas Brandt,” Millie noted in her dull voice.
A new gravity possessed John Woolfolk.
“You must not go back to the house,” he decided.
“Wait,” she replied. “I was terribly frightened when he went up to his room. When he came down he thanked me for cleaning it. I told him he was mistaken, that I hadn’t been in there, but I could see he was suspicious. He cried all the time he was cooking dinner, in a queer, choked way; and afterward touched me—on the arm. I swam, but all the water in the bay wouldn’t take away the feel of his fingers. Then I saw the boat—you came ashore.