The world was a
gray, wet blanket. Not a light from the village below pierced the
mist, and the lonely army of tall cedars on the black hill back of
the house was hidden completely.
"Who's there?" Mrs. Brenner hailed. But her voice fell flat and
muffled. Far off on the beach she could dimly hear the long wail of
a fog-horn.
The faint throb of hope stilled in her breast. She had not really
expected to find any one at the door unless perhaps it should be a
stranger who had missed his way at the cross-roads. There had been
one earlier in the afternoon when the fog first came. But her
husband had been at home then and his surly manner quickly cut short
the stranger's attempts at friendliness. This ugly way of Mart's had
isolated them from all village intercourse early in their life on
Cedar Hill.
Like a buzzard's nest their home hung over the village on the
unfriendly sides of the bleak slope. Visitors were few and always
reluctant, even strangers, for the village told weird tales of Mart
Brenner and his kin. The village said that he--and all those who
belonged to him as well--were marked for evil and disaster. Disaster
had truly written itself through-out their history. His mother was
mad, a tragic madness of bloody prophecies and dim fears; his only
son a witless creature of eighteen, who, for all his height and bulk,
spent his days catching butterflies in the woods on the hill, and his
nights in laboriously pinning them, wings outspread, upon the bare
walls of the house.
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