The men trudged slowly back to the cluster of lights that marked the town, and the woman closed her door, and she and the child went to bed.

Instead of sleeping, they talked over their adventure.

He sat up in bed, big-eyed with excitement, while his mother told him that the drunken visitor was Lige Bemis, who had come to revisit a cave, a horse thief's cave, he had said, back of the big rock that seemed to have slipped down from the ledge behind the house, right by the spring.

She told the boy that Bemis had said that the cave contained a room wherein they used to keep their stolen horses, and that he tried to move the great slab door of stone and, being drunk, could not do so.
When the men of Sycamore Ridge who left the stage without waiting to see what human seed it would shuck out arrived at Main Street, the stage was in the barn, the driver was eating his supper, and the passenger was in bed at the Thayer House.

But his name was on the dog-eared hotel register, and it gave the town something to talk about as Martin Culpepper was distributing the mail.