He did not know it, but Martha was deaf to his reports. She had her own thoughts. She felt herself curiously strong of will, and there raced in her blood the high determination to act that very night. Not for nothing had she spent the rain drenched days in terrified silence in her room. All of her energies that were still capable of being mustered to her resolve, she had converted in the crucible of her will, and huddled in terror, she had forged the determination to go out when the time came and to cut herself free of the fiendish power that was searing her mind and slowly crushing her. She remembered that in her faint, when she lay limp and inert, a thing of dread, she had felt herself crumple up at the touch of Jim—Jim reaching out to her. Now she would cut herself free of him at the very source of his power over her. She would go that very night.
She cast a glance toward the closet where Deems kept his trowel and chisel. She would have need of them, she knew. She said "Good night" rather more loudly and vehemently than she had intended, for she was feeling nervous.
She was awakened by a feeling of cold. As she sat up she saw that the door was open. What was it drew her eyes through the hallway and out into the open and brought her up suddenly? There came upon her an eeriness that startled and chilled her, and suddenly, as if it were coming at her through the open door, fingers out-thrust, there appeared the hand.
She was out of bed on the instant. Somehow in her throat she repressed the upstartled cry, "Jim," by an effort that strained all her nerves and made her face bloodless white. She could not, however, repress completely the instinctive movement of her hands to ward off the menacing hand. Suddenly a panic seized her and in terrified haste she moved to the closet and, feeling a moment, took what she knew was Deems's chisel.
Do what she could, she could not stem the flow of panic, and suddenly as she began to pant and breathe heavily with the strain of terror, she began also to gasp her pleadings to Jim.
"Don't, Jim. Don't take me," and, as if not at all of her own volition, but at that of a guiding power, she moved out of the house, ghastly in the night, mumbling and shivering.
She was still atremble—she was now chilled by the dampness of ground and air—when she stood by Jim Sloan's gravestone. White it gleamed against the sky, and now Martha's trembling and murmuring turned into a furious industry as she raised the chisel to the stone.
"Jim—you'll let me be, won't you? You'll let me be? I want 'a live yet." She began a frenzied hacking at the gravestone, seeing nothing but the play of her chisel, and the white, fearful stone towering over her, hearing nothing but the rasp of the chisel—not even hearing the rattle of the loosened gravel as it slid from under the stone.
Deems Lennon and his wife were awakened by a heavy crash. "What can it be?" he asked his wife, and then left the bed and ran up to Martha's room. She was gone. Instantly they were both fully awake.
"It's Jim's grave she's gone to," ventured Deems. "Remember the way she said 'Oh!' that time I told how the rain loosened the stone? Come on, we'll go see."