The Humming Bird Comes Home

Cornell Woolrich The Humming Bird Comes Home

This story must be told in terms of two dimensions — hearing and touch. For sight has no part in it. It is the story of “Ma” Adams and her son Ben and how he went straight. And Ma Adams was blind…

There were three of them in the front room of the big country house, one night about dusk. Ma Adams and Mary, who was her companion, and a man’s voice coming in over the radio from a big city several hundred miles away.

Ma Adams sat in her rocking chair, stroking a tortoiseshell cat on her lap. You could not tell she was blind by looking at her. The pupils of her eyes were not destroyed. Only a certain fixedness about them gave her away.

In every other possible way life seemed to have done its best to atone to her for its cruelty. She did not look the fifty-six years that were her age. Her face, under its halo of silvery hair, was that of a woman of thirty. Her back was as straight as a youngster’s. As long as she remained indoors, she found her way about unaided with astonishing dexterity. Pieces of furniture, of course, must not be moved out of their accustomed places. Mary saw to that.

Mary was seventeen. She was one of those rare human beings without a selfish impulse in her make-up. Companioning Ma Adams wasn’t duty to her; it was love. This was a kind of Eden, this out-of-the-way old country house.

And as though to show how different that other world outside was from the happiness and peace of this one, there was the voice of this man coming in, timed very low, giving a dramatized news flash of the day’s events.

“It’s noon, and the streets outside the Farmers’ Bank are filled with the lunch-hour crowd. There are two armed guards on duty in the lobby. A young man steps jauntily in from the street. He’s humming as he crosses the marble floor, apparently without a care in the world. He goes to one of the writing slabs along the wall and fills out a deposit slip — well, maybe we’d better call it a withdrawal slip — and he keeps on humming.

“Teller J. P. Smith has just come back from his own lunch, and as he re-enters his cage he hears that muffled tune stop in front of his wicket. He reaches for the slip that is handed in to him and scans it. There are just three words on it, short and to the point: All you’ve got. And there’s a gun peering at him through the bars. And the man behind it is still humming!

“Then something happens. The guards’ suspicions are aroused. As they move forward to investigate, they’re shot down from behind. Two accomplices have been standing in the doorway, unnoticed. Then the teller is shot down, too, in cold blood, without any excuse. And the last thing the cowed employees of the bank hear, as the murderer backs warily out with his loot to a car at the curb, is that same monotonous tune coming from his lips!

“The Hummingbird, ladies and gentlemen! The coldblooded, wanton killer who sings at his work. The dying teller told them later, when he regained consciousness for a short while, what the tune was. He recognized it — ‘St. Louis Blues.’ The next time you hear it, remember—”

“Mary!” Ma Adams said, with what for her was unusual sharpness. “That’s the third time I asked you to shut that off. That’s not fit stuff for a child your age to hear!”

A click, and there was silence in the room. Slowly the effect of the words wore off, like an evil exhalation finding its way out of the house.

After a while the girl said, “Capitol City. That’s where Ben was the last time you heard from him, wasn’t it?”

Ma Adams could tell she’d glanced up at the picture on the wall. She’d never seen it herself, but she knew it was there. She dusted it off every day with a special little silk handkerchief, not used for anything else.

“That was nearly two years ago,” she said quietly. “I suppose he’s moved on somewhere else by now.” She sighed a little. Five years was a long time to be alone in the dark. Mary’s hand came to rest on her shoulder, pressed down hard.

“That’s all right, child,” Ma Adams said gratefully. “He wanted to get somewhere, be somebody. I know he has too. He’ll be coming back—”

Outside on the highway, in the night silence, the hum of a machine in high gear was coming nearer. Few cars came by this way. They sat listening, waiting for it to reach a crescendo and race on by. It reached a crescendo, then stopped dead with a sudden jamming of brakes.

There was a quick step on the porch, then a pounding fist at the front door. Again and again it struck. The whole house seemed to shake with the force of the knocking.

Mary’s chair creaked as she jumped up. Ma Adams stayed there, listening, “watching” with her ears. Walls didn’t impede her “sight” — she could be in one room and “see” what went on in another, if it was close enough.

Mary’s footsteps went hurrying down the hall. A click sounded as she pushed the wall switch that controlled the porch light. The door opened and a voice growled, “Put that out! What’s the matter with you?”

The click sounded a second time. Then footsteps heavier than Mary’s came toward the room…

But Ma Adams was on her feet already, arms stretched quiveringly out before her into the dark. The dispossessed cat hit the floor with a soft thud.

“Ben!” It was just a whispered breath that she uttered.

“Who’s here with you?” the man asked. His voice swung around her, so she knew his head had swung with it, as he took in the room.

“Just the two of us, Ben. Mary came a week after you left—”

But he’d gone back to the door again. “Get him in here. Hurry up!” His voice was directed out into the open. Other footsteps staggered up onto the porch, as though bearing a burden.

“Upstairs!” Ben said curtly, and then to the girl, “That woodshed still standing around in back?”

“Yes,” she answered in a frightened voice.

“Hop in with me and show me the way,” he commanded. “Gotta get the car in off the road!”

The heavily weighted footsteps, meanwhile, went toiling up to the floor above. A feeble groan sounded. A voice answered it fiercely: “Shut up, you jinx, or I’ll conk you!”

The throbbing of the motor started up again, at the same place where it had stopped. It traveled around the side of the house, faded away across the fields toward the back.

Ma Adams crossed the room to the wall. Her ten fingertips found the cool, smooth glass of the picture. She held them like that, up against it, in a sort of prayer of thanksgiving.

She had turned and was waiting for his delayed greeting when he and Mary came in through the back. He gave it to her, a rough, careless stroke of his hand across her silvery hair. “H’ya, old lady?” Strange, curt greeting from that strange outer world that had swallowed him five years before! Such a casual greeting, and after so long a time! Before he had left…

A chair creaked under him. A match hissed. The unaccustomed fragrance of tobacco smoke drifted toward her. But there was some kind of tension coming from Mary. She could feel it.

“What’s the matter, child?” she asked.

“I… I’ve got blood on the hem of my dress!” the girl gasped.

“That’s from the seat of the car,” Ben said easily. “We had a little accident, busted the windows. One of the guys with me got hurt a little.”

“Maybe we’d better send for Doctor Chase—” Ma Adams began anxiously.

His voice changed abruptly, cutting her like a whip across the face. “No Doctor Chase and nobody else, get me? We’ll take care of him ourselves. We’re funny that way.”

She edged timidly nearer. “Let me see if you’ve… you’ve changed any, Ben,” she pleaded.

Her fingertips were her eyes. She reached out, exploring his face with ten feather-light fingers, trembling with emotion. Familiarity came first, familiarity of the contour, the bone structure. Then, dismayingly, strangeness crept in along with it. A smooth, strange coolness, like paraffin, like a wax false face superimposed on his own.

“It’s not you at all!” The wounded cry of distress was wrung from her by that strangeness. “Something’s happened to you, Ben!”

He struck her hands down impatiently. “I got scarred in a fight, hadda have it fixed up a little—”

A voice called down from above, “Get some hot water up here, quick!”

“I’ll take it up,” Mary said.

“I’ll take it up myself,” he growled. “You stay here where you are.”

After he’d gone, swearing softly to himself, Mary remarked, “That must have been a bad accident they had. The car’s got little holes all over it, and all the glass is broken.”

Ma Adams did not answer. She just sat staring into the dark, holding her hands to her face. It wasn’t him at all. It wasn’t the Ben she had sent out into the world so bravely that day years ago! Something had happened to that Ben! Something horrible.

Someone started screaming upstairs, and a door was slammed shut. She could still hear the screams, but after a while they stopped. Then she heard Ben and someone else coming down again. Their voices on the stairs were two husky murmurs that only ears like hers could have detected.

“Looks infected to me.”

“If he’s gonna croak, why don’t he get it over with, instead of holding us up like this!”

They came into the room. Ben said, “This is Bill Johnson, a business partner of mine.” A strangled sound, like a suppressed chuckle, came from the other man.

They sat down at the table. Mary’s footsteps hurried in and out, bringing the food. But that same impression of tension kept coming from her to Ma’s sharp senses. A dish crashed suddenly as it fell out of her hands.

“Quit looking at her!” Ben growled. “What’s the matter with you?”

Ma Adams bent her head a little, guiding her food to her mouth. It should have been wonderful, this reunion, after five years, and instead it was all so strange, so — so furtive.

Afterward the groaning started in again from that room above, and one of them went up, though she wasn’t sure which of the two it was. There was so much unaccustomed movement around her tonight that, for the first time, her faculties failed her a little, and she couldn’t quite keep track of who was about her. She groped for her rocker, sat down in it. The radio was on again, purring softly:

“That’s right, dear,” Ma Adams said, when Mary had come in from the kitchen and the sound had ebbed away. “Turn it off. We don’t want to hear any more—”

“I didn’t,” the girl said. “It wasn’t on at all. That was Ben humming. He just went out of the room.”

Ma Adams’s head slowly dropped down over her chest, as though she were very sleepy. She was wide awake, though. But the lids were down over her eyes.

The groans upstairs suddenly sharpened to a scream, then stopped. Footsteps ran back and forth — she could hear them through the ceiling. Both men were up there.

The girl was suddenly crouched down beside her, shivering. “I’m so frightened,” she whimpered.

Ma Adams stroked her hair. It was rumpled and awry. She ran a soothing hand down Mary’s face. The silky texture of her skin was gritty. The girl sensed the unasked question.

“I sooted up my face with coal dust,” she said. “I mussed up my hair. He… he keeps looking at me so, that friend of Ben’s!”

It did not seem at all strange to the two of them that the young girl should come to the blind old lady for protection.

The groaning had stopped upstairs. Ben’s steps came running down abruptly, went past them into the kitchen. He moved around in there a little, came out again.

“Looking for something, Ben?” Ma Adams asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m looking for a shovel.”

There was sudden, nameless horror in the room. That silence upstairs — Ma Adams’s arm flashed out around the girl’s shoulder.

A harsh, scratchy sound that was her voice forced its way up through her throat after a moment.

“There’s one outside, by the back door,” she heard herself say.

He closed the room door leading to the stairs. “You two stay in here,” he ordered. Then he went out the other way, to the back. They heard him pick up the shovel from against the side of the house, carry it off into the dark with him. His voice trailed off in the deathly stillness.

There was an abrupt movement of the girl’s head, as she turned her face, to hide it against Ma Adams’s shoulder.

Little sounds were all that remained. The creak of Ma Adams’s rocker. The tick of the clock on the shelf. The distant bite of a shovel into the earth, out in the open field behind the house somewhere…

Ben was still humming when he came back twenty minutes later. He did not pass through the room they were in but went directly up the stairs from the back door.

A bed creaked up above. Then heavy, slower footsteps, two sets of them, started down. They were separated by about a six-foot distance as they passed outside the closed door of the living room. Ma Adams’s ears could tell her things like that. Her ears could also make out the slight rustle of a sheet or something trailing along the floor. And like a dirge, very low, someone was humming:

Ma Adams did something she had possibly never done in all her unseeing years before. She pressed the palms of her hands tightly against her ears and shut them off from the outside world, sealing out sounds that had no right to exist at all.

She removed them about the time the two men were coming back again, Ben and his friend, Bill Johnson. They were both laughing out there in the open, as they came toward the house. She didn’t know how long it had been. The girl, Mary, had not moved but was still cowering there by her side. Ma Adams could feel the beat of the girl’s heart. She urged her to her feet, with an upward pressure of the wrists.

“You go up to your room,” she breathed. “Go to bed now. That’s a good girl. Lock your door on the inside. Don’t be frightened; I’ll be down here. I’ll—”

The shovel clanged against the boards of the house as it was thrown down. Bill Johnson’s voice said, “It’s more than he would ’a’ done for me.”

They came into the kitchen, and tap water rumbled into the sink. “Looka that! Blisters all over me mitts!”

Ben laughed. “Can’t take it, huh?”

Ma Adams stretched out a detaining hand toward the hall door, where the girl stood, poised for flight. Her voice was almost casual:

“Child, you know more about those things than I, you listen so much to that radio set. How does this ‘St. Louis Blues’ piece go?”

The girl’s voice was stifled. “Something about hating to see that evening sun go down!” A frightened sob broke from her. Her footsteps went running lightly up the stairs. A moment later the door of her room slapped shut.

Ma Adams sat there in her rocker, while the men finished washing their hands in the kitchen, rocking slowly, like an automaton. She’d had very little, until now. A son, somewhere, whom she’d been proud of. A son she’d known was going to be a fine, successful, upright man. That had made the darkness easier to bear.

Now she had nothing, nothing at all. That son she’d been proud of was gone. Now the darkness was Stygian, without hope, without consolation.

After a long while a voice penetrated through her misery — how long after she did not know nor care.

“Where’d the wren go?” It was Bill Johnson’s voice.

“Upstairs, to bed,” a voice that was hers answered.

“Lay off!” Ben said sharply.

There was an odor of liquor in the room around her. Their voices were a little blurred. Not much, but a little. The cat yowled abruptly, and Johnson’s voice said angrily, “Get away from me, Fleas!” as though he had just kicked it.

Ben said pointedly, “You always stay up this late, old-timer?”

She got up without answering and felt her way toward the door.

“No hard feelings,” he said. “We’ve just got a little business we wanta talk over, that’s all.” And then, as she traced her way expertly along the hall wall toward the stairs, he called after her, “Can you make it?”

They were evidently watching her from the doorway. “Great stuff!” she heard Johnson say, surprised into admiration.

She went all the way up, nearly to the top of the stairs, then froze there. To her, it was like being in the same room with them. A bottle clinked against a glass.

“Now that we’re rid of him,” Johnson said, “what’re we hanging around for? Let’s get out of this Godforsaken dump! We can make it. Hijack somebody and switch cars, take the first boat we see that looks good. When do we blow?”

“Let’s kill two birds with one stone.” That was Ben’s voice. “There’s a pushover they call a bank in the hick town near here. The money they handle is just as good as anyone else’s, though. Whaddya say we stop by there in the morning on our way out? All the hayseeds for miles around come in and sock their dough away.”

“Ain’t we hot enough now?”

“That’s just it! They won’t be expecting us to show for another six months. It’ll be a whole lot easier right now than later. ‘Get it while the getting’s good’ is my motto! Then we can really pull down the shades and keep ’em that way until the heat goes off!”

“O.K., it’s a deal,” Johnson said. “But it’s the last job I pull with you until you get them tonsils of yours taken out! You and that tune you’re always humming!”

She heard Ben laugh. “I don’t even know I’m doin’ it any more. It’s like second nature.”

They came out into the lower hall, and she crept noiselessly across the upper one, into her room, stood there pressed against the door.

She heard them coming up. “Where do I flop?” Johnson asked.

Ben growled, “What do I care where you flop?”

“I ain’t going in there where we had him! Whaddya think I am?”

She tensed as the knob of Mary’s door rattled ineffectually in someone’s grasp. Then Ben’s voice sounded roughly: “C’mon, lay off! There’s an empty one down at the end.”

Their two doors closed, one after the other. She could still hear them both moving around, even after that, for a little while. Shoes clopped down. A click in the room next to hers, as the light went off. Then another click, minutes later, down at the end of the hall. Then silence.

She stayed there, quiet, listening, while seconds ticked into minutes, and minutes into a half hour. She didn’t know, at first, what she was going to do. What was there she could do?

Even after she had eased her door open and crept back into the hall, she didn’t know. There was a small thing, a rite, calling her downstairs. When she got there, she felt for the picture on the wall, unstrung it, took it down. Noiselessly she opened the grate in the kitchen stove, thrust it in, glass and all, where the hot ashes lingered, and replaced the lid.

She had had a son. That was all over with now. There were two enemies in the house with her. Two enemies who, between them, had shattered the beacon lighting her eternal darkness, had destroyed the only happiness she’d had.

This man who’d come here tonight wasn’t her son. Even his face had been changed, molded with paraffin. And now he and his friend were going out tomorrow to rob her fellow townspeople, some of them her lifelong friends, to shoot them down in cold blood as they had already shot others.

She couldn’t bring back to life those they had already killed. She couldn’t undo the ghastly evil they had committed in the great cities hundreds of miles away from here. But she could prevent their doing it any more. She could put a stop to it from now on. And thus it came to her slowly what it was she must do.

She went outside through the kitchen door. Slowly she groped her way around the house, one hand out against its boards to guide her. The heavy shutters of every lower-floor window she drew together, latched on the outside. Then she went in again. The kitchen door was half glass, but she locked the outer storm door over it securely, drew the key out, threw it in the stove.

Then she went back to the upper hall again, soundlessly, step by cautious step. It was easy for her to move quietly. The darkness was no obstacle, for she was always in darkness. Their heavy breathing, in their respective rooms, was so audible out here.

Wraithlike, a shadow without substance for all the sound she made, she went down the hall. She went to Johnson’s room first, found the knob with the silent tips of her fingers, turned it, opened it just wide enough to admit her.

She knew where the bed was in here, but she must be careful, for he might have moved the rocker out of place. She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled across the floor in a straight, unwavering line toward the bed. He had moved the chair out of line, and she would have tripped and fallen over it had she been upright. Her padding hand came to rest on one of its curved bases when she least expected it. She gripped it, held it motionless.

Kneeling there beside it, her hands went over the tumbled clothes he had tossed onto it. She didn’t know much about those things — those weapons that shot people down. But she knew they must have them somewhere, even when they slept.

It wasn’t with the clothes on the chair. Maybe he kept it on his body, even in bed at night. Maybe under the pillow…

The thought of turning back never even occurred to her. She had set out to do something, and there is no patience so terrible as that of the helpless.

It wasn’t on him anywhere. He turned restlessly in his liquor-ridden sleep under the insect-lightness of her fumbling hands. She crouched there below the bed, waiting for him to settle back into heavy slumber again.

She had never known the human hand could be made so flat, so spadelike, as when hers prodded here and there, under the mattress he lay on, under the very pillow his head rested on. Nothing. Despair then settled on her briefly. She must have these implements of death. Not for her own safety — that didn’t count with her — but because they were the only arguments these two men understood, respected, could be made to obey.

And then, as she rose to move back a little, something heavy brushed her shoulder. Something hanging from the head of the bed — there within her reach the whole time.

She felt a leather holster, weighted down, fumbled with it, drew out what it contained, hid it in the folds of her apron. Back at the door again, clutching it tightly to her with one hand, she changed the key over to the outside, turned it, drew it out.

She hid the trophy in her own room, in a place they’d never find, even with their unimpaired eyes, then went into Ben’s room. This time it was easier, for she knew where to look for the gun. He never even stirred, but it took time, lots of time. She took the key out of his door, too, after she’d locked it. Then she went across the hall and pecked with her nails at the girl’s door.

There was a quick movement, a whispered, “Who’s there?” Mary had been awake. Ma Adams had known she would be. She put her lips close to the keyhole. “Open. Open, dear,” she breathed hurriedly.

The door moved back, and she heard Mary’s frightened breathing.

“Get on your things. Come downstairs. I’ll be waiting at the front door. Sh, don’t make a sound now!”

The girl knew enough not to use the lights. Ma Adams still had the second gun hidden in her apron, as she stood by the front door, when Mary groped her way down the unlighted stairs toward her. Ma Adams reached out, thrust a copper penny into the girl’s hand.

“Remember what that electrician explained, that time we had the trouble with the lights? Dear, would you be afraid to drop this behind the master switch in the fuse box? Light a match. Don’t hold it in your hand; just drop it and close the switch on it. Careful, child, that you don’t burn yourself.”

The girl didn’t ask her why she wanted it done. There was a low phut! from the kitchen, as the fuses blew out under the short circuit the penny made, and she heard Mary jump hurriedly back. The odds would be more even now between Ma Adams and her enemies. At least until dawn came.

When the girl had slipped back to where she waited, Ma Adams gripped her by the shoulder. “Can you drive that car they put in the woodshed?”

“I… I think so.”

“Then drive it into town and come back with help. Get the state police.”

“And you—”

Ma. Adams unwrapped the gun. A sudden intake of breath told her the girl had seen what it was, even in the dark.

“I’ll stay here,” she said. “Otherwise they’ll just go out and kill more people. I don’t want them to do that. I’ll keep them here.”

“But Ben’s — your son,” the girl faltered.

Ma Adams didn’t answer for a moment. Finally she said, “I want him to go straight. That’s all I have left now. You have to pay for the things you do. There isn’t any other way.”

She pushed the girl gently but firmly through the open door. “Hurry, dear. I’ll wait here by the door. The windows and the back door are locked, and all the shutters are closed. There isn’t any other way for them to get out. I’m not afraid. But hurry. Don’t take too long.”

The girl’s running steps died out around the side of the house. Ma Adams locked the heavy outer door, took the key out, thrust it into the top of her shoe. Then she stood there, waiting, with her back to the door, awkwardly holding the unaccustomed gun with both hands.

The muffled whine of the car sounded, slowly rounding the house to get back on the highway. The girl was driving it carefully, to make as little noise as possible. Ma Adams could tell when it had reached the level macadam, for there was less jogging.

Then suddenly, sickeningly, it backfired. A shattering report tore the quiet night to pieces. Instantly after, the machine sped off, straight and true, toward town. The sound of it died down in the distance.

But already the first preliminary knob wrenchings from the doors upstairs had changed to a violent battering of feet and fists against the panels. Ma Adams stood motionless where she was, her head lowered as if she was looking at the floor.

Johnson’s voice came down to her clearly.

“Hummer! Where are you? I’m locked in here, and my rod’s been lifted!”

Ben’s voice came back. “Me, too! Hit it with a chair. They’ve lammed out with the car. We gotta get outa here!”

She heard the terrific crash of a chair lifted bodily against one of the panels. The chair shattered and there was a sound of sticks falling all over the floor. Good old house, with its strong, solid doors, thought Ma Adams.

Mary couldn’t get to town and back under three-quarters of an hour. Before she could get some men together it would be well over an hour. It didn’t matter much. He was going to go straight, this enemy who had changed places with her son; he was going to go straight. That was the only way she could get her son back again.

The din upstairs increased. They were like a couple of caged bears on a rampage. She heard the footsteps of one retreat to the far end of the room, then come lunging at the door. The impact seemed to shake the whole house. He did it a second time, and a third. Then suddenly there was a sound like a giant firecracker, and she heard a section of the door slap back against the wall outside. He’d got out!

She took a deep breath, straightened; the back of her shoulders found the door behind her, pressed flat against it. She didn’t know which of the two men it was. There was a momentary lull, after the terrible din that had been going on. Stealthy footsteps moved about up there. She tensed, waiting. But they didn’t come down. They went into one of the other rooms, came out again. Two shots went off in rapid succession, with a sound of metal flying apart. The second door flung open, with a curse.

“That did it,” one of them said in a low, hoarse voice. “They overlooked Shorty’s rod in the other room! C’mon, I’m taking a powder outa this place, before we have the whole works down on our necks!”

Their voices mingled; they snarled words to each other that Ma Adams could not catch. Suddenly fear and anger had made their voices strangely similar — both low, hoarse, animal-like. She could not even be certain now which was which.

Footsteps, one set of them, came to the head of the stairs, started down, close to the wall, with an awkward hesitancy Ma Adams’s own never had. Whoever was descending couldn’t see his way. The blind stalking the blind! She was holding the gun out straight toward the sound, one finger around the trigger, supporting the heavy barrel on the palm of her other hand.

There came a tiny click, not as loud as a light switch would make; it was the sound of a flashlight turned on, directed toward her. The momentary hitch in the oncoming tread told her she had been seen by the prowler.

Ma Adams stiffened.

“Is that you, son?” she said calmly. “Don’t come any nearer or I’ll shoot.”

The steps started again, very slowly, very heavily, as if someone was fixing his gaze so intently on her he had forgotten to walk softly.

“Drop that gun, old lady!” The words were a mere thread of whispered snarl. “Or I’ll plug you!” Which of them had spoken she could not tell. But she did not lower the gun she held.

“Don’t!” the other voice rasped flatly. “You can’t shoot her! She’s blind and she’s my—”

There was a sound of footsteps, as of someone leaping forward. Another sound, as something hard struck momentarily against a banister. Then a gun went off for the third time in that house that night.

There was a thud from the plaster ceiling over the stairs. Something came clattering, skittering down from above, landing nearly at her feet. She found it with the toe of her shoe, kicked it off to one side. Flat and heavy it was, and made of metal.

The staircase was creaking, whining, with two heavy bodies struggling on it. And now Ma Adams was trembling all over, as she stood there with her back pressed against the locked door. Her son was fighting for her! Risking his life for her. He was her son once more, the son she had lost, and she was proud of him again. The one light in her darkness was flickering back to life.

There was a wild yelp, of fright, of terror and pain, and something tumbled heavily down the long stairway. Rolling, falling, all the way to the bottom, to lie there still, without sound. A heavy breath or two, and then even that had stopped.

After a long, stunned interval shaky footsteps started down toward her once more from above. She let them come on, past the halfway mark, all the way to the bottom, past the obstacle that lay there at the foot of the stairs. She held the gun poised rigidly at the sound. She didn’t ask who it was. She didn’t need to.

A low hum came toward her, a mere thread of sound.

A hand came to rest on the muzzle of the gun, slowly shifted it aside.

“Mother,” a whispered breath in her ear said, so faintly that only she could have heard the words, “let me out. I’ve got to go. But I’m going — straight.”

Her fingers fumbled at the key. Someone brushed past her, then the door closed, and she was alone once more. But now she had her happiness back, her pride — the lamp that had lit her lonely darkness for so long and would light it now again.

They came more quickly than she’d expected, the men Mary had brought. Cars braked to a stop outside, excited voices, hurried footsteps on the porch.

She was still standing there with her back to the door. It was unlocked now. Their opening of it brushed her lightly aside. She was still holding the gun, but it was pointed downward at the floor now. She could tell they were bending over what lay there in the hall before her.

“One of them got away, eh?” somebody said to her. “Which way did he go?”

Another voice said, “She can’t tell you; she’s—”

“Yes,” Ma Adams said, “I can tell you which way he went. He went straight.”

She stood aside, to let them carry the dead man out of the house. She didn’t attempt to touch his face as he went by. What was he to her? A stranger, an enemy? She had no interest in him. So they carried him out and through the glare of the headlights of the car that stood there.

“He’s gone straight,” she whispered gladly to herself, and did not hear the sudden gasp from Mary, in the yard, as the light fell on the dead man’s face.

But she was right, for it was Ben, and he had gone straight at last.