In vain he tried to break the silence. There was no answer—no sign that he was in the same world, save the fact of his body's presence.
The first streak of dawn was widening on the eastern horizon when Norton's cramped legs limped into the gate of his home. He stopped to steady his nerves and looked blankly up at the window of his boy's room. He had given Tom his mother's old room when he had reached the age of sixteen.
Somewhere behind those fluted pillars, white and ghost-like in the dawn, lay the girl who had suddenly risen from the dead to lead his faltering feet up life's Calvary. He saw the cross slowly lifting its dark form from the hilltop with arms outstretched to embrace him, and the chill of death crept into his heart.
The chirp of stirring birds, the dim noises of waking life, the whitening sky-line behind the house recalled another morning in his boyhood. He had waked at daylight to go to his traps set at the branch in the edge of the woods behind the barn. The plantation at that time had extended into the town. A fox had been killing his fancy chickens. He had vowed vengeance in his boyish wrath, bought half a dozen powerful steel-traps and set them in the fox's path. The prowler had been interrupted the night before and had not gotten his prey. He would return sure.
He recalled now every emotion that had thrilled his young heart as he bounded along the dew-soaked path to his traps.
Before he could see the place he heard the struggles of his captive.
"I've got him!" he shouted with a throb of savage joy.
He leaped the fence and stood frozen to the spot. The fox was a magnificent specimen of his breed, tall and heavy as a setter dog, with beautiful appealing eyes. His fine gray fur was spotched with blood, his mouth torn and bleeding from the effort to break the cruel bars that held his foreleg in their death-like grip. With each desperate pull the blood spurted afresh and the steel cut deeper into bone and flesh.
The strange cries of pain and terror from the trapped victim had struck him dumb. He had come with murder in his heart to take revenge on his enemy, but when he looked with blanched face on the blood and heard the pitiful cries he rushed to the spot, tore the steel arms apart, loosed the fox, pushed his quivering form from him and gasped:
"Go—go—I'm sorry I hurt you like that!"