And Adam Craig was a vulture preying upon the unrest in
his heart that he had hoped to stifle.

He went downstairs with a shudder, craving stars and darkness, unbolted
the front door and went out upon the porch.

The valley was black. Its lonely points of light vanished early. Up
here on the ridge there was wind and quiet. He peopled the gulf of
blackness ahead with things sinister and evil in spirit like Adam Craig
and turned his back upon it with a shiver. There would be peace in the
voice of the river.

The starlight, dim and soft, had a sense of silver in its
indistinctness. To Kenny, walking through the orchard, ghosts of
blossoms blew fragrantly above his head. The blossoms were gone like
his peace of mind. He hungered for Joan.

In the velvet dimness the wistaria vine beneath her window loomed forth
like a shower of shadow; a grotesque ladder of bloom warm to his mind
with invisible color and yet darker to his eye than the night with its
silver sheen of stars.

A ladder? Kenny caught his breath and stood still, quite still. It
was a ladder. Some one was climbing down. Branch after branch the
climber touched with unerring instinct and ran off noiselessly through
the orchard to the south.

Kenny's heart throbbed with a ghastly fear.

It was Joan.

He knew what lay to the south beyond the orchard: woodlands and
wildness, nothing else. The fields Hughie cultivated stretched to the
north from the kitchen windows. There in the forest to the south where
the river curved off at a tangent and flowed directly east, Brian had
had his camp. On farther Joan had never cared to go. Where did she go
now in the starlit darkness, climbing down the wistaria ladder with a
cloak around her shoulders? To what did she venture through the
solitude of whispering trees and the gloom of the pine forest?

A lover's tryst? Kenny sickened and choked. He could not follow her.
He would not.

He turned back instead and went to bed to lie wakeful until dawn with
something new and horrible gnawing at his heartstrings. Then he fell
asleep and dreamed of monsters.

CHAPTER XI

THE CABIN IN THE PINES

He did not mean to go again. He did not mean to watch the wistaria
vine. He went, he told himself wildly, to evade the summons that was
sure to come from Adam Craig. But when the glimmer of wistaria swayed
beneath a footfall, madness came upon him and he went stealthily
through orchard and forest, stalking