HE WORE a shapeless and dusty suit of black linen that was small on him and his beard and hair were long and black and tangled. He wore neither shirt nor collar and his bare feet were out at the toes of a pair of handmade brogans. He said nothing. They gave before him until he reached the wagon and stood looking down at the man in the bed of it. They waited, a mass of grave faces. He turned slowly and looked about him. It’s old man Salter, one said. Dead. Stobbed and murdered. He nodded. All right, he said. Let’s be for findin the man that done it. And in the glare of the torches nothing of his face visible but the eyes like black agates, nothing of his beard or the suit he wore gloss enough to catch the light and nothing about his hulking dusty figure other than its size to offer why these townsmen should follow him along the road this night.

In the cool and smoking dawn there hung from a blackhaw tree in a field on the edge of the village the bodies of two itinerant millhands. They spun slowly in turn from left to right and back again. As if charged with some watch. That and the slight flutter of their hair in the morning wind was all the movement there was about them.