It was early June and the Wellivers had lived in Bidwell, for four months and, during the last year of her life at Fort Wayne Maud had been so continually ill that she had seldom seen the grocer, but now a letter had come from him. The letter came from the city of Cleveland. “I am here at a convention of the K of Ps,” he wrote, “and I have met a man here who is a widower like myself. We are in the same room at the hotel. I want to stop to see you on the way home and would like to bring my friend along. Can’t you get another girl and we’ll all spend an evening together. If you can do it, you get a surrey and meet us at the seven-fifty train next Friday evening. I’ll pay for the surrey of course and we’ll go off somewhere to the country. I’ve got something very important I want to say to you. You write me here and let me know if it’s all right.”
Maud sat in the field beside May and thought of the letter. An answer must be sent at once. In fancy she saw the little bright-eyed grocer standing before May, the hero of the passage in the wood with Jerome Hadley, the woman who lived the romance of which she herself dreamed. At the post office during the afternoon she had heard two young men talking of a dance to be given at a place called the Dewdrop. It was to be held on Friday evening, and a bold impulse had led her to go to a livery stable and make inquiry about the place. It was twenty miles away and on the shores of Sandusky Bay. “We will go there,” she had thought, and had engaged the surrey and horses and now she was face to face with May and the thought of the little grocer and his companion frightened her. Freeman Hunt the widower had a bald head and a grey mustache. What would his friend be like? Fear made Maud’s body tremble and when she tried to speak, to tell May of her plan, the words would not come. “She’ll never do it. I’ll never get her to do it,” she thought again.
“There was a man here. For weeks he lay sick to the point of death in our house and all the time I did not dare sleep.”
May Edgley was building high her tower of romance. Having several times listened, as Maud told of the imaginary son of the railroad president who had been determined to marry her, she had set about making a romantic lover of her own. Books she had read, the remembrance of childhood tales of love and romantic adventure poured in upon her mind. “There was a man here. He was just twenty-four but what a life he had led,” she said absentmindedly. She appeared to be lost in thought and for a long time was silent. Then she got suddenly to her feet and ran to where two large maple trees stood on a little hill in the midst of the field. Maud also got to her feet and her body shook with a new fear. The grocer was forgotten. May returned and again sat on the grass. “I thought I saw someone snooping there behind that tree,” she said. “You see I have to be careful. A man’s life depends on my being careful.”
Warning Maud that whatever happened she was not to tell the secret, now for the first time to be told to another, May launched into her tale. On a dark night, when it was raining and when the trees shook in the wind, she had got out of bed in the Edgley house and had opened her window to behold the storm. She could not imagine what had led her to do it. It was something she had never done before. To tell the truth a voice outside herself seemed to be calling her, commanding her. Well, she had thrown up the window and had stood looking out. How the wind screamed and shrieked! Furies seemed abroad in the night. The house itself trembled on its foundations and great trees bent almost to the ground. Now and then there was a flash of lightning and she could see the whole outdoors as plain as day—“I could even see the leaves on the tree.” May had thought the world must be coming to an end but for some strange reason she was not in the least afraid. It was impossible to explain the feeling she had on that night. Well, she couldn’t sleep. Something, outside there, in the darkness, seemed to be calling, calling to her. “All of this happened more than two years ago, when I was just a young girl in school,” she explained.
On that night when the storm raged May had seen, during one of the flashes of lightning, a man running desperately across the very field, where now she and Maud sat so quietly. Even from where she stood by the window in the upstairs room she could see that he was white and that his face was drawn and tired from long running. Behind him, perhaps a dozen strides behind, was another man, a giant black, with a club in his hand. In a moment May knew, she knew everything, knowledge came into her mind and illuminated it as the lightning had illuminated the scene in the field. The giant black with the club was about to kill the other man, the white man in the field. In a moment she knew she would see a murder done. The fleeing man could not escape. At every stride the black gained. There came a second flash of lightning and then the white man stumbled and fell. May threw up her hands and screamed. She had always been ashamed of the fact but why deny it—she fainted.
What a night that had turned out to be! Even to speak of it made May shudder, even yet. Her father had heard her scream and came running to her room. She recovered—she sat up—in a few quick words she told her father what she had seen.
Well, you see, her father and she had got out of the house somehow. They were both in their night dresses and in the woodshed back of the house her father had fumbled about and had got hold of an axe. It was the only weapon of any kind he could lay his hands on about the place.