They all looked at each other, unable to forecast anything of Blackburn’s experiences; for both doors had been locked when the body had been found.  Granted life, how would it have been possible for Silas Blackburn to have left the room to commence his period of drowsiness?  An explanation of that should also unveil the criminal’s route in and out.

The tensity of the little group increased, but no one interposed the obvious questions.  Robinson was right.  It would be quicker to let the protagonist of this unbelievable adventure recite its details in his own fashion.  Paredes ran his slender fingers gropingly over the faces of several of the cards he had picked up.

“When I got in bed,” Silas Blackburn continued, “I thought I’d let the candle burn for company’s sake, but there was a wind, and it came in the open window, and it made the queerest black shadows dance all over the walls until I couldn’t stand it a minute longer.  I blew the candle out and lay back in the dark.”

He drew harshly on his cold pipe.  He looked at it with an air of surprise, and slipped it in his pocket.

“It was the funniest darkness.  I didn’t like it.  You put your hand out and closed your fingers as if you could feel it.  But it wasn’t all black, either.  Some moonlight came in with the wind between the curtains.  It wasn’t exactly yellow, and it wasn’t white.  After a little it seemed alive, and I wouldn’t look at it any more.  The only way I could stop myself was to shut my eyes, and that was worse, for it made me recollect my father the way I saw him lying there when I was a boy.  God grant none of you will ever have to see anything like that.  Then I seemed to see Katy’s father, too; and I remembered his screams.  The room got thick with, things like that—­with those two, and with a lot of others come out of the pictures and the stories I’ve heard about my family.”

His experience when he had gone to the room to take the evidence from Howells’s body became active in Bobby’s memory.

“There I lay with my eyes shut,” Silas Blackburn went on in his strange, inquiring voice.  “And yet I seemed to see those dead people all around me, and I thought they were in pain again, and were mad at me because I didn’t do anything.  I guess maybe I must ‘a’ been dozing a little, for I thought—­”

He broke off.  He raised his hand slowly and pointed in the direction of the overgrown cemetery where they had seen his coffin covered that noon.  His voice was lower and harsher when he continued: 

“I—­I thought I heard them say that things were all broken out there, and—­and awful—­so awful they couldn’t stay.”

His voice became defiant.

“I ain’t going to tell you what I dreamed.  It was too horrible, but I made up my mind I would do what I could if I ever escaped from that room.  I—­I was afraid they’d take me back with them underneath those broken stones.  And you—­you stand there trying to tell me that they did.”