He released the bag he was dragging and increased his pace, running blindly into the dark while intermittent lightning showed him stumps to dodge and deadfalls to leap. The sack bounced madly on his back and he ran constantly through an outraged din of protestation. Lightning bloomed and died and in the inkblack pause of thunder he ran fulltilt into the bole of a tree and went tumbling into the hollow in a riot of squawks and curses.

He sat stunned for a moment clutching his spinning heart. The sack had opened and chickens were running into the night. He held his breath and listened for Weiss. All he could hear was an angry muttering from the pullets. He arose and took up the empty sack and began to stalk the chickens, trying to lure them back into the sack. They wouldn’t come. Then he began to run after them one at a time but they fluttered away, cackling and flapping their wings, and finally he threw the sack away and began to curse them. He went shambling on down toward the mouth of the hollow and all about him chickens were taking to the trees like pale spirits rising.

3

Over the years Hardin had taken on the lineaments of evil. You would sometimes see him on a Saturday streetcorner, the center of a group of men itemizing the faults of the world. When he spoke men listened. He seldom laughed but when he did the rest of the men laughed too in sporadic bursts of mirthless noise. No one wanted to be in his disfavor, it had come to seem that being in his disfavor was tantamount to being homeless.

There were folks in the bootlegging trade who had decided they might be in the wrong line of work. The Moon family had been at it for three generations and within a fortnight of Hardin’s decision to shut them down two of them were in Detroit bolting doors on carbodies and the third was logging for Sam Long. That was Bud. Bud was the first one to the still after the explosion rocked the hills and when he got to the head of the hollow the still was just not there. It was scattered over a larger area than Bud would have thought possible and there was no piece of it that would not have fitted comfortably into a shoebox. A week or so later they attempted to sell off what stock they had on hand and Bud’s house mysteriously burned.

Hardin’s vulpine face was leaner and more cunning than ever, the cold yellow eyes more reptilian. Or sharklike, perhaps, lifeless and blank save a perpetual look of avarice. And he went through life the way a shark feeds, taking into its belly anything that attracts its attention, sucking it into the hot maw of darkness and drawing nourishment from that which contained it, expelling what did not.

There was a gemlike core of malevolence beneath the sly grin, beneath the fabric of myth the years had clothed him in. In these myths he supplanted the devil, the tooth-and-claw monsters of childhood darkness. “You behave yourself or I’ll give you to old man Hardin,” women told their children. “You better get to sleep,” they cautioned them at night. “If you don’t mind, he’ll slip in that winder and carry you off so quiet we won’t even hear him.” His spirit moved in the night, rustled the branches outside their window, his familiars crouched in the brush where the porchlight faded away.

“He shot and killed old Lester Sealy just as sure as I’m settin here,” a man might say in the poolhall.

“Why, shore he did. Everybody knows he was goin with Lester’s old woman. But how you goin to prove he killed him? Bellwether tried that hisself.”

“Well, the kids of Lester’s could I reckon. At the first. You know they first told Hardin done it but I reckon they might’ve been persuaded Lester done it hisself. Old Mrs.