Greening made a show of considering it a minute.

"Well, Joe, you go on over and tell him yourself," said he, putting on
the front of generosity and confidence, "I know you won't run off."

"If I had anything to run off for, I'd go as quick as anybody, I guess,"
said Joe.

"I'll go and fetch the old lady over to keep company with Mrs. Chase,"
said Sol, hurriedly striking across the road.

Joe remained standing there a little while. The growing wind, which
marked the high tide of night, lifted his hat-brim and let the moonlight
fall upon his troubled face. Around him was the peace of the sleeping
earth, with its ripe harvest in its hand; the scents of ripe leaves and
fruit came out of the orchard; the breath of curing clover from the
fields.

Joe brought a horse from the barn and leaped on its bare back. He turned
into the highroad, lashing the animal with the halter, and galloped away
to summon Constable Bill Frost.

Past hedges he rode, where cricket drummers beat the long roll for the
muster of winter days; past gates letting into fields, clamped and
chained to their posts as if jealous of the plenty which they guarded;
past farmsteads set in dark forests of orchard trees and tall windbreaks
of tapering poplar, where never a light gleamed from a pane, where sons
and daughters, worn husbandmen and weary wives, lay soothed in honest
slumber; past barn-yards, where cattle sighed as they lay in the
moonshine champing upon their cuds; down into swales, where the air was
damp and cold, like a wet hand on the face; up to hill-crests, over
which the perfumes of autumn were blowing--the spices of goldenrod and
ragweed, the elusive scent of hedge orange, the sweet of curing fodder
in the shock; past peace and contentment, and the ripe reward of men's
summer toil.

Isom Chase was dead; stark, white, with blood upon his beard.

There a dog barked, far away, raising a ripple on the placid night;
there a cock crowed, and there another caught his cry; it passed on, on,
fading away eastward, traveling like an alarm, like a spreading wave,
until it spent itself against the margin of breaking day.

Isom Chase was dead, with an armful of gold upon his breast.

Aye, Isom Chase was dead. Back there in the still house his limbs
were stiffening upon his kitchen floor. Isom Chase was dead on the
eve of the most bountiful harvest his lands had yielded him in all
his toil-freighted years. Dead, with his fields around him; dead,