Hubbard achieved a laugh.
“I’ll tell ye where Harper is. He’s cleared out, that’s what I think—deserted his family.”
That night, and many following nights, Hubbard did not sleep. Some weeks later a tremendous electric storm broke in the night. One particularly heavy clap so startled the wakeful Hubbard that he leaped from his bed and dressed. In the pouring rain he started out.
Inevitably his steps took him toward the well. It was black, and he could not see at first. But another flash came, and he observed a strange thing:
The huge oak, standing at the side of the well, had been split in two by lightning, and one portion of the tree had fallen over the mouth of the hole.
Next morning Simpson, the man with the “tin Lizzie,” stopped at Hubbard’s place. He was a blunt-spoken, red-faced man whom Hubbard hated.
“That was a bad storm last night,” he said. “The lightning struck the big oak tree by the well.”
“What of it?” snapped Hubbard.
“There was a skeleton in the center of that tree,” explained Simpson. “I was talking this morning with the sheriff over the telephone. He said seventy-five years ago a man was murdered in Ovid, and they never found his body. This skeleton must be his.”