He said he could not take a step further, but sat down on a neighbour's porch and looked and looked.

"It was curious," he said, "but the only thing I could see or think about was our old family clock which they had stuck on top of the pile, half tipped over.

It looked odd and I wanted to set it up straight.

It was the clock we bought when we were married, and we'd had it about twenty years on the mantel in the livin'-room.

It was a good clock," he said.
He paused and then smiled a little.
"I never have figured it out why I should have been able to think of nothing but that clock," he said, "but so it was." When he got home, he found his frail daughter just coming out of the empty house, "coughing as though she was dyin'." Something, he said, seemed to stop inside him.