Yet he was chilled somewhat by the strange silence hanging over the little town that he loved so well.

It was night, it was true, but not even a dog barked at his coming, and there was not the faintest trail of smoke across the sky.

A brilliant moon shone, and white stars unnumbered glittered and danced, yet they showed no movement of man in the town below.
He shook off the feeling, believing that it was merely a sensitiveness born of time and place, and rode straight for his mother's house.

Then he dismounted, tied his horse to one of the pines, and ran up the walk to the front door, where he knocked softly at first, and then more loudly.
No answer came and Dick's heart sank within him like a plummet in a pool.

He went to the edge of the walk, gathered up some gravel and threw it against a window in his mother's room on the second floor.