"Why, she is afraid."
He could hear her panting now, her voice almost a wall of diffident yet iron determination:
'I don't know what to do.
I don't know what to do." ("I do," he thought.
"Go back to town and go to bed.") But he did not say it.
He looked at the two huge rotting gate posts in the starlight, between which no gates swung now, wondering from what direction Bon and Henry had ridden up that day, wondering what had cast the shadow which Bon was not to pass alive; if some living tree which still lived and bore leaves and shed or if some tree gone, vanished, burned for warmth and food years ago now or perhaps just gone; or if it had been one of the two posts themselves, thinking, wishing that Henry were there now to stop Miss Coldfield and turn them back, telling himself that if Henry were there now, there would be no shot to be heard by anyone.
'She's going to try to stop me,' Miss Coldfield whimpered.
'I know she is.
Maybe this far from town, out here alone at midnight, she will even let that Negro man—And you didn't even bring a pistol.
Did you?"
'Nome,' Quentin said.
'What is it she's got hidden there?
What could it be?
And what difference does it make?
Let's go back to town, Miss Rosa."
She didn't answer this at all.
She just said,
'That's what I have got to find out,' sitting forward on the seat, trembling now and peering up the tree-arched drive toward where the rotting shell of the house would be.
'And now I will have to find it out,' she whimpered, in a kind of amazed self-pity.
She moved suddenly.
'Come,' she whispered, beginning to get out of the buggy.
'Wait,' Quentin said.
'Let's drive up to the house.
It's a half a mile."
'No, no,' she whispered, a tense fierce hissing of words filled with that same curious terrified yet implacable determination, as though it were not she who had to go and find out but she only the helpless agent of someone or something else who must know.
'Hitch the horse here.
Hurry."
She got out, scrambled awkwardly down, before he could help her, clutching the umbrella.
It seemed to him that he could still hear her whimpering panting where she waited close beside one of the posts while he led the mare from the road and tied one rein about a sapling in the weed-choked ditch.
He could not see her at all, so close she stood against the post: she just stepped out and fell in beside him when he passed and turned into the gate, still breathing in those whimpering pants as they walked on up the rutted tree-arched drive.
The darkness was intense; she stumbled; he caught her.
She took his arm, clutching it in a dead rigid hard grip as if her fingers, her hand, were a small mass of wire.
'I will have to take your arm,' she whispered, whimpered.
'And you haven't even got a pistol—Wait,' she said.
She stopped.
He turned; he could not see her but he could hear her hurried breathing and then a rustling of cloth.
Then she was prodding something at him.
Here,' she whispered.
'Take it."
It was a hatchet; not sight but touch told him—a hatchet with a heavy worn handle and a heavy gapped rust-dulled blade.
'What?" he said.
'Take it!" she whispered, hissed.
'You didn't bring a pistol.
It's something."
'Here,' he said; 'wait."
'Come,' she whispered.
'You will have to let me take your arm, I am trembling so bad."
They went on again, she clinging to one of his arms, the hatchet in his other hand.
'We will probably need it to get into the house, anyway,' she said, stumbling along beside him, almost dragging him.
'I just know she is somewhere watching us,' she whimpered.