With this return of confidence Nathaniel’s thoughts reverted to his present greatest need, which was food.  Since early morning he had eaten nothing and he began to feel the physical want in a craving that was becoming acutely uncomfortable.  If Obadiah had not returned to his home he made up his mind that he would find entrance to the cabin and help himself.  A sudden turn in the path which he was following, however, revealed one of the councilor’s windows aglow with light, and as he pressed quietly around the end of the building the sound of a low voice came to him through the open door.  Cautiously he approached and peered in.  A large oil lamp, the light of which he had seen in the window, was burning on a table in the big room but the voice came from the little closet into which Obadiah had taken him the preceding night.  For several minutes he crouched and listened.  He heard the chuckling laugh of the old councilor—­and then an incoherent raving that set his blood tingling.  There is a horror in the sound of madness, a horror that creeps to the very pit of one’s soul, that sends shivering dread from every nerve center, that causes one who is alone with it to sweat with a nameless fear.  It was the voice of madness that came from that little room.  Before it Nathaniel quailed as if a clammy hand had reached out from the darkness and gripped him by the throat.  He drew back shivering in every limb, and the voice followed him, shrieking now in a sudden burst of insane mirth and dying away a moment later in a hollow cackling laugh that seemed to curdle the blood in his veins.  Mad!  Obadiah Price was mad!  Step by step Nathaniel fell back from the door.  He felt himself trembling from head to foot.  His heart thumped within his breast like the beating of a hammer.  For an instant there was silence—­a silence in which strange dread held him breathless while he watched the glow in the door and listened.  And after that quiet there came suddenly a cry that ended in the exultant chattering of a name.

At the sound of that name Nathaniel sprang forward again.  It was Marion’s name and he strained his ears to catch the words that might follow it.  As he listened, his head thrust half in at the door, Obadiah’s voice became lower and lower, until at last it ceased entirely.  Not a step, not a deep breath, not the movement of a hand disturbed the stillness of the little room.  By inches Nathaniel drew himself inside the door.  His heavy boot caught in a sliver on the step but the rending of wood brought no response.  It was the quiet of death that pervaded the cabin, it was a strange, growing fear of death that entered Nathaniel as he now hurried across the room and peered through the narrow aperture.  The old councilor was half stretched upon the table, his arms reaching out, his long, thin fingers gripping its edges, his face buried under his shoulders.  It looked as if death had come suddenly to him during some terrible convulsion, but after a moment Nathaniel saw that he was breathing.  He went over and placed a hand on the old man’s twisted back.