Just outside of town as the troubled man was urging on his nag to greater speed, he encountered Rance Joyner. The boy was trudging steadily along the road in the grey light, coming from town and going towards home, and, according to the story Roberts told, Rance was carrying a heavy sack of meal which he had plumped over his right shoulder and supported with his hand. As the man in the buggy passed him, the boy half turned, paused, looked up at him, and spoke. In this circumstance there was nothing unusual. Roberts had passed the boy a hundred times coming or going to the town on some errand.
On this occasion, Roberts said he returned the boy’s greeting somewhat absently and curtly, weighted down as his spirit was with haste and apprehension, and drove on without stopping. But before he had gone a dozen yards the man recalled himself and pulled up quickly, intending to shout back to the boy the reason for his haste, and to ask him to stop at his house on the way home, do what he could to aid the stricken woman, and wait there till the man returned with help. Accordingly, Roberts pulled up, turned in his seat, and began to shout his message down the road. To his stupefaction, the road was absolutely bare. Within a dozen yards the boy had vanished from his sight, “as if,” said Roberts, “the earth had opened up and swallered him.” But even as the man sat staring, gape-mouthed with astonishment, the explanation occurred to him:
“Thar were some trees thar down the road a little piece, a-settin’ at the side of the road, and I jest figgered,” he said delicately, “that Rance had stepped in behind one of ’em fer a moment, so I didn’t stop no more. Hit was gettin’ dark an’ I was in a hurry, so I jest drove on as hard as I could.”
Roberts drove in to town, got the woman’s sister whom he had come to fetch, and then returned with her as hard as he could go. But even as he reached home and drove up the rutted lane, a premonition of calamity touched him. The house was absolutely dark and silent: there was neither smoke nor sound nor any light whatever, and, filled with a boding apprehension, he entered. He called his wife’s name in the dark house, but no one answered him. Then, he raised the smoky lantern which he carried, walked to the bed where his wife lay, and looked at her, seeing instantly that she was dead.
That night the people from the neighborhood swarmed into the house. The women washed the dead woman’s body, dressed her, “laid her out,” and the men sat round the fire, whittled with knives, and told a thousand drawling stories of the strangeness of death and destiny. As Roberts was recounting for the hundredth time all of the circumstances of the death, he turned to Lafayette Joyner, who had come straightway when he heard the news, with his wife and several of his brothers:
“…and I was jest goin’ to tell Rance to stop and wait here till I got back, but I reckon it was just as well I didn’t—she would have been dead a-fore he got here, and I reckon it might have frightened him to find her.”
Fate Joyner looked at him slowly with a puzzled face.
“Rance?” he said.
“Why, yes,” said Roberts, “I passed him comin’ home just as I got to town—and I reckon if I hadn’t been in such a hurry I’d a-told him to stop off and wait till I got back.”
The Joyners had suddenly stopped their whittling. They looked upward from their places round the fire with their faces fixed on Roberts’ face in a single, silent, feeding, fascinated stare, and he paused suddenly, and all the other neighbors paused, feeling the dark, premonitory boding of some new phantasmal marvel in their look.
“You say you passed Rance as you were goin’ in to town?” Fate Joyner asked.
“Why, yes,” said Roberts, and described again all of the circumstances of the meeting.
And, still looking at him, Fate Joyner slowly shook his head.
“No,” said he, “you never saw Rance. It wasn’t Rance that you saw.”
The man’s flesh turned cold.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Rance wasn’t there,” said Fate Joyner. “He went to visit Rufus Alexander’s people a week ago, and he’s fifty miles away from here right now. That’s where he is tonight,” said Fate quietly.
Roberts’ face had turned grey in the firelight. For several moments he said nothing. Then he muttered:
“Yes. Yes, I see it now. By God, that’s it, all right.”
Then he told them how the boy had seemed to vanish right before his eyes a moment after he had passed him—“as if—as if,” he said, “the earth had opened up to swaller him.”
“And that was it?” he whispered.
“Yes,” Fate Joyner answered quietly, “that was it.”
He paused, and for a moment all the feeding, horror-hungry eyes turned with slow fascination to the figure of the dead woman on the bed, who lay, hands folded, in composed and rigid posture, the fire-flames casting the long flicker of their light upon her cold, dead face.
“Yes, that was it,” Fate Joyner said. “She was dead then, at that moment—but you—you didn’t know it,” he added, and quietly there was feeding a deep triumph in his voice.