Nevertheless he approached the old house cautiously, skirting the
mountain to avoid Pleasant Valley, and walking a mile or two through
thick undergrowth, sometimes with difficulty propelling the faithful
machine.

Arrived in sight he studied the surroundings carefully, harbored his
wheel where it would not be discovered and was yet easily available,
and after reconnoitering stole out of covert.

The house stood gaunt and grim against the smiling morning. Its
shuttered windows giving an expression of blindness or the repellant
mask of death. A dead house, that was what it was. Its doors and
windows closed on the tragedy that had been enacted within its massive
stone walls. It seemed more like a fortress than a house where warm
human faces had once looked forth, and where laughter and pleasant
words had once sounded out. To pass it had always stirred a sense of
mystery and weirdness. To approach it thus with the intention of
entering to find that still limp figure of a man gave a most
overpowering sense of awe. Billy looked up with wide eyes, the deep
shadows under them standing out in the clear light of the morning and
giving him a strangely old aspect as if he had jumped over at least ten
years during the night. Warily he circled the house, keeping close to
the shrubbery at first and listening as a squirrel might have done,
then gradually drawing nearer. He noticed that the down stairs shutters
were solid iron with a little half moon peep hole at the top. Those
upstairs were solid below and fitted with slats above, but the slats
were closed of all the front windows, and all but two of the back ones,
which were turned upward so that one could not see the glass. The
doors, both back and front, were locked, and unshakable, of solid oak