For a moment the two men sat in silence, as if each were lost in thoughts of his own. Then the old man spoke.
“What did you do then?”
“I filled in the grave,” replied Clayton, “and went home.”
A shower of sparks climbed suddenly from the fire and whirled up among the tree branches, and the dark woods seemed to move again to the undulation of the flames.
“That’s quite a tale,” said the old man finally, chewing his pipe.
“It’s a true one,” said Clayton simply. “You know about the old Reese place. Can you tell me anything of it that would help to explain it?”
The old man stared into the fire and brushed at the silver edges of his whiskers.
“Well,” he said, “some says one thing, some another, and it’s all been a good while back.” He worked the cork from his bottle, took a comfortable swallow, and replaced the cork carefully, his eyes never leaving the fire.
“Sam Reese, they say, was an easy-come, easy-go sort of devil, and he looked a lot like your tall man on the horse. His brother Burl was a hard worker, not as smart as Sam, nor as forward, but he was a plodder, and they both worked on the farm till Sam fell for a town girl and took up sparkin’ instead. Worst thing about it was, the girl was Minnie McBain, and his brother, though he’d never got around to sayin’ anythin’ about it, had picked out Minnie to be his wife, whenever the farm got out from under the mortgage. It made bad blood between them, though it wasn’t much of a contest. Burl was the kind who looked at a woman and blushed, and pulled his hat off when one came in a room. Sam was a regular ladies’ man, they say, and could talk a wasp out of stingin’ him.”
“You seem to know a lot about them,” remarked Clayton, offering his host a cigarette.
“Old folks talk,” said the old man, shaking his head. “It was the talk of the country, seein’ what happened. Sam got the girl in the family way, got skeered of matrimony and left the country. Some said he joined the army, and I reckon he did. Burl, he married the girl and made that house for her instead of the cabin he and Sam had shared, but he didn’t have no luck.”
The old man stuffed tobacco in his pipe and spat in the fire.
“The girl, she died a-birthin’, and the little ’un too, and Burl kept pluggin’ along, makin’ a crop now and then, and everyone said he was waitin’ for his brother to come home. But far as anyone knowed, he never did come.”
From somewhere, miles away, came the cry of the hounds in the night. The pack ran echoing up a great hollow, where the sound was muffled in the big woods, and then crossed a ridge, where their plaintive buglings were clear; then they faded again and were gone. There remained only the brittle starlight and the humming silence of the fire.
Very slowly, but deliberately, Clayton turned from the fire and slid his rifle up until the muzzle was trained on the older man.
“I wondered,” he said, cocking the hammer, “why this strange insight had come to me, and why I saw these things. I was meant to catch a murderer.”
The old man looked at him bemused, and puffed his pipe.
“I believe you’re seein’ things again,” he said drily.
“The lilac bush,” said Clayton, with a tight mouth. “You said, ‘You had to look under the lilac bush,’ but I’d never mentioned what kind it was.”
He gained his feet carefully, and looked down on the old man. “You know why? Because there wasn’t any bush at all when I got back there in the daylight. It was only when I began to dig in the place where I’d seen the bush the night before that I found the old, gnarled roots of a lilac, dead for dozens of years.”
The old man sighed. “And just what would you aim to do, son, if you could get anybody to believe you?”
“I’ll do what I was meant to do, I suppose,” said Clayton calmly, “bring you to a justice you’ve escaped.”
He held the rifle in one hand, and digging in his coat pocket, pulled out a greenish object which he held to the firelight.
“Here’s the proof,” he said, “or part of it. A button from your brother’s coat.”
The old man stared up at him, and he smiled, showing rows of uneven, worn teeth. His eyes shone red as if the fire were contained in them.
“There’s a small mischance in your figurin’, young man,” he said, “and I’ll tell you where it lies. How old do you calculate me to be?”
“That’s not hard to guess,” said Clayton coldly, keeping the rifle trained. “You were thirty or thirty-five when I saw you bury your brother, and I reckon you’re near seventy-five now.”
The old man laughed, with a dry, wheezing sound. “That would make it forty years ago or so.” He chuckled. “No, no, that’ll never do. Sam Reese went off to the army in the summer of sixty-three, a hundred years ago last June, and he came back a year later, nearly to the day.”
“Prove it,” said Clayton.
“Prove it yourself,” said the old man, grinning. “Look at the button and use your eyes,” he added.
“Hardly,” said Clayton, getting a tighter grip on the rifle. He threw the button to the old man. “If there’s something to be proved, you show me.”
The old man held the button a moment, smiling, as if it warmed his hand, then he spat on it, keeping his eyes fixed on Clayton. He began to polish it on his ragged coat, and as he polished it he spoke.
“He killed her, as surely as I killed him, her havin’ a baby he didn’t care enough about even to give it a name. And after I married her she wasn’t happy with me; she kept waitin’ for him to come back. She didn’t say nothin’, but I could tell. Well, I was waitin’ too, and I had a lot of time to study about it after Minnie died. The night that horse come down the road, I killed my brother, with this gun you see here, and I’ve expected you, or someone like you, over the years. But it’ll be small satisfaction to you, young feller, and maybe I’ll have some peace. Here!”
He held up the button in the light, and Clayton bent a little to look at it, keeping his rifle pointed at the old man’s chest.
The button was nearly eaten away with corrosion, but the old man’s rubbing had brought some of the brassy metal to life, and Clayton could see clearly the three letters upon it.
“And now,” said the old man, “what do you see?”
“C,S,A,” read Clayton. “Confederate States of America.”
“And there’s your proof,” said the old man. He handed the button carefully to Clayton, and he took it as carefully and dropped it into his pocket, still keeping the gun trained on the old man. “There’s proof,” the old fellow repeated, “that you’re wrong, or that I’m 140 years old.
“You see, you found me all right, but you’re too late for it. Your glass wall lies between us, and you can’t touch me, only see me.”
Clayton blinked.
“Do you reckon,” said the old man, “that this is the end of it? Or do you reckon you’ll go on being able to see inside things for the rest of your life?”
He smiled with narrowed eyes at the flames, and in a motion quick for so old a man, swung up his rifle from the ground and pointed it at Clayton. “Or do you suppose,” he asked almost mischievously, “that it works the other way ’round?”
With the flash from the muzzle Clayton fired too, and the woods reverberated endlessly with the report. For a moment Clayton stood stock still, eyes squeezed shut with the sight of the muzzle blast in them.
And then he opened them slowly. There was nothing to see hut the empty clearing in the woods and the firelight winking among the tree trunks, and the drifting, acrid smoke from what had been the old man’s parting joke. Clayton shook his head slowly, trying to remember what he was doing standing in the woods in the middle of the night, but nothing would come, except that he must have fallen asleep by his fire.