She pointed out to me the Devil’s Croft of which I had heard from the doctor, and I saw it to be a grove of trees, closely and almost rankly set. It stood apart from the sparser timber on the hills, and around it stretched bare fields. Their emptiness suggested that all the capacity for life had been drained away and poured into that central clump. No road led near to it, and I was obliged to content myself by idling the car at a distance while we gazed and she talked.
“It’s evergreen, of course,” I said. “Cedar and a little juniper.”
“Only in the hedge around it,” Susan Gird informed me. “It was planted by the town council about ten years ago.”
I stared. “But surely there’s greenness in the center, too,” I argued.
“Perhaps. They say that the leaves never fall, even in January.”
I gazed at what appeared to be a little fluff of white mist above it, the whiter by contrast with the black clouds that lowered around the hilltops. To my questions about the town council, Susan Gird told me some rather curious things about the government of the community. There were five councilmen, elected every year, and no mayor. Each of the five presided at a meeting in turn. Among the ordinances enforced by the council was one providing for support of the single church.
“I should think that such an ordinance could be set aside as illegal,” I observed.
“I think it could,” she agreed, “but nobody has ever wished to try.”
The minister of the church, she continued, was invariably a member of the council. No such provision appeared on the town records, nor was it even urged as a “written law,” but it had always been deferred to. The single peace officer of the town, she continued, was the duly elected constable. He was always commissioned as deputy sheriff by officials at the county seat, and his duties included census taking, tax collecting and similar matters. The only other officer with a state commission was the justice; and her father, John Gird, had held that post for the last six years.
“He’s an attorney, then?” I suggested, but Susan Gird shook her head.
“The only attorney in this place is a retired judge, Keith Pursuivant,” she informed me. “He came from some other part of the world, and he appears in town about once a month—lives out yonder past the Croft. As a matter of fact, an ordinary experience of law isn’t enough for our peculiar little government.”
She spoke of her fellow-townsmen as quiet, simple folk who were content for the most part to keep to themselves, and then, yielding to my earnest pleas, she told me something of herself.
The Gird family counted its descent from an original settler—though she was not exactly sure of when or how the settlement was made—and had borne a leading part in community affairs through more than two centuries. Her mother, who had died when Susan Gird was seven, had been a stranger; an “outlander” was the local term for such, and I think it is used in Devonshire, which may throw light on the original founders of the community. Apparently this woman had shown some tendencies toward psychic power, for she had several times prophesied coming events or told neighbors where to find lost things. She was well loved for her labors in caring for the sick, and indeed she had died from a fever contracted when tending the victims of an epidemic.
“Doctor Zoberg had known her,” Susan Gird related. “He came here several years after her death, and seemed badly shaken when he heard what had happened. He and Father became good friends, and he has been kind to me, too. I remember his saying, the first time we met, that I looked like Mother and that it was apparent that I had inherited her spirit.”
She had grown up and spent three years at a teachers’ college, but left before graduation, refusing a position at a school so that she could keep house for her lonely father. Still idiotically mannerless, I mentioned the possibility of her marrying some young man of the town. She laughed musically.
“Why, I stopped thinking of marriage when I was fourteen!” she cried. Then, “Look, it’s snowing.”
So it was, and I thought it time to start for her home. We finished the drive on the best of terms, and when we reached her home in midafternoon, we were using first names.
Gird, I found, had capitulated to Doctor Zoberg’s genial insistence. From disliking the thought of a séance, he had come to savor the prospect of witnessing it—Zoberg had always excluded him before. Gird had even picked up a metaphysical term or two from listening to the doctor, and with these he spiced his normally plain speech.
“This ectoplasm stuff sounds reasonable,” he admitted. “If there is any such thing, there could be ghosts, couldn’t there?”
Zoberg twinkled, and tilted his beard-spike forward. “You will find that Mr. Wills does not believe in ectoplasm.”
“Nor do I believe that the production of ectoplasm would prove existence of a ghost,” I added. “What do you say, Miss Susan?”
She smiled and shook her dark head. “To tell you the truth, I’m aware only dimly of what goes on during a séance.”
“Most mediums say that,” nodded Zoberg sagely.
As the sun set and the darkness came down, we prepared for the experiment.
The dining-room was chosen, as the barest and quietest room in the house. First I made a thorough examination, poking into corners, tapping walls and handling furniture, to the accompaniment of jovial taunts from Zoberg. Then, to his further amusement, I produced from my grip a big lump of sealing-wax, and with this I sealed both the kitchen and parlor doors, stamping the wax with my signet ring. I also closed, latched and sealed the windows, on the sills of which little heaps of snow had begun
