. Trimm was only
fifty-two years old. Besides which, he's dead and buried. I guess maybe
you'd better think agin, grandpap, and see if you ain't Methus'lah or
the Wanderin' Jew."

"I am Hobart W. Trimm, the banker," whispered the stranger with a sort
of wan stubbornness.

"Go on and prove it," suggested the chief, more than willing to prolong
the enjoyment of the sensation. It wasn't often in Westfield that
wandering lunatics came a-calling.

"Got any way to prove it?" he repeated as the visitor stared at him.

"Yes," came the creaking, rusted hinge of a voice, "I have."

Slowly, with struggling attempts, he raised his hands into the chief's
sight. They were horribly swollen hands, red with the dried blood where
they were not black with the dried dirt; the fingers puffed up out of
shape; the nails broken; they were like the skinned paws of a bear. And
at the wrists, almost buried in the bloated folds of flesh, blackened,
rusted, battered, yet still strong and whole, was a tightly-locked pair
of Bean's Latest Model Little Giant handcuffs.

"Great God!" cried the chief, transfixed at the sight. He drew the bolt
and jerked open the lower half of the door.

"Come in," he said, "and lemme get them irons off of you--they must hurt
something terrible."

"They can wait," said Mr. Trimm very feebly, very slowly and very
humbly. "I have worn them a long, long while--I am used to them.
Wouldn't you please get me some food first?"

II

THE BELLED BUZZARD

There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from Big
Niggerwool, which lay across the river. It was traversable only by those
who knew it well--an oblong stretch of tawny mud and tawny water,
measuring maybe four miles its longest way and two miles roughly at its
widest; and it was full of cypress and stunted swamp oak, with edgings
of canebrake and rank weeds; and in one place, where a ridge crossed it
from side to side, it was snaggled like an old jaw with dead tree
trunks, rising close-ranked and thick as teeth. It was untenanted of
living things--except, down below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and
a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that
the country people called logcocks--larger than pigeons, with flaming
crests and spiky tails--swooping in their long, loping flight from snag
to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering
a strident cry which matched those surroundings so