Her mother had mentioned some such name to him once when she had checked him to whine:
“No word of my boy Jud yet. After all these years wouldn’t he ’a’ wrote me a line, wouldn’t he ’a’ got home somehow in all these years, don’t you think—if he was still alive?”
He did not like to consider old Mrs. Lasher and he rose to continue his search for his own son, also lost in a sea of mystery, gone a-whaling after some strange love.
RoBards avoided the Tarn of Mystery, so gayly named and so justified in the event. But he saw no sign of Junior elsewhere, so he drew near the loathsome spot, circling about it and coming closer reluctantly.
The old rail fence was almost rotted away, but he did not need to climb across it, for there was a path that led to an opening where two of the upper rails had been laid on the ground.
The great boulders were as before but less mysterious, if one could believe a recent theory that they had been dropped there by a universal glacier that had once covered all this part of the world with an ocean of ice, whose slowly ebbing tide would flow back again perhaps and cover all of man’s ambitious monuments.
He squeezed through a strait Cyclopean gateway of rock, and the little green pond lay before him, still thick with submerged grasses, still oversprinkled with curled autumn leaves.
He gazed at the spot where he had beaten Jud Lasher and used him as a flail. He quivered with a nausea for that whole chapter in his life, and was glad that his swinging glance discovered no other human presence.
But as he was about to back through the narrow crevice between the stones, he heard a voice floating above his head in the air, a girl’s voice, as liquid and as sweetly murmurous as the voice should have been of the nymph that should have haunted this viridescent pool.
It was very mournful and it said: