le odds. Once or twice words
flashed like fire through the pit: "Tyrant!--Fool to go."

From a long immersion deeper in the pit he struggled frantically. He must
get out. Somehow he must find wings. He realized that his eyes were
closed. He tried to open them and failed. So the pit persisted and he
surrendered himself, as one accepts death, to its hateful blackness.

Abruptly he experienced a momentary release. There was no more swaying,
no more movement of any kind. He heard a strange, melancholy voice,
whispering without words, always whispering with a futile perseverance as
if it wished him to understand something it could not express.

"What is it trying to tell me?" he asked himself.

Then he understood. It was the voice of the wind, and it tried to tell
him to open his eyes, and he found that he could. But in spite of his
desire they closed again almost immediately. Yet, from that swift
glimpse, a picture outlined itself later in his memory.

In the midst of wild, rolling clouds, the moon was a drowning face.
Stunted trees bent before the wind like puny men who strained impotently
to advance. Over there was one more like a real man--a figure, Bobby
thought, with a black thing over its face--a mask.

"This is the forest near the Cedars," Bobby said to himself. "I've come
to face the old devil after all."

He heard his own voice, harsh, remote, unnatural, speaking to the dim
figure with a black mask that waited half hidden by the straining trees.

"Why am I here in the woods near the Cedars?"

And he thought the thing answered:

"Because you hate your grandfather."

Bobby laughed, thinking he understood. The figure in the black mask
that accompanied him was his conscience. He could understand why it
went masked.

The wind resumed its whispering. The figures, straining like puny men,
fought harder. The drowning face disappeared, wet and helpless. Bobby
felt himself sinking back, back into the sable pit.

"I don't want to go," he moaned.

A long time afterward he heard a whisper again, and he wondered if it was
the wind or his conscience. He laughed through the blackness because the
words seemed so absurd.

"Take off your shoes and carry them in your hand. Always do that. It is
the only safe way."

He laughed again, thinking:

"What a careful conscience!"

He retained only one more impression. He was dully aware that some time
had passed. He shivered. He thought the wind had grown angry with him,