So when Asa's brother was killed, everybody thought Asa had done it so that he would get his brother's share of the family property. There were people along the valley who contended--in the seclusion of their own homes, of course--that they could see the very guilt on Asa's face. When they saw Asa down at the village they looked at him as if they could actually see the red blood dripping from his hands. But nobody could prove the man's guilt.

The brother was buried up on the slope behind the house. Everyone took note of the fact that Asa, the only surviving relative, did not even dignify the grave by so much as planting a cedar tree to mark the place. The neighbors felt that he had as leave forget the grave, as well as the brother. This contention was borne out some time later when Asa decided to turn that particular hillside for rye and make some money out of it. Asa couldn't see wasting open and tillable land for graves and such. So Asa Meters got Henry Holt to come and plow the field for him, grave site and all.

The brother had been buried in a shallow grave, and Henry knew that. The soil was not very deep along that slope and nothing short of dynamite or a stonecutter's tools could have made a deep grave there. Henry was thinking of these things when he finally worked his bull-tongue plow over to the grave section of the rye field he was preparing. He rested his mule at the end of a row, pondered the matter, and then decided what to do.

Henry Holt had grown up, there in the hills, hearing that the sure and proven way of finding a murderer was to place the victim's skull above the suspect's head, high up and out or reach of water. In this situation, when the question is put to the suspected man, there is no power left in him to lie out of his deed any longer.

So after that day of plowing, and after that decision on Henry's part, he somehow was able to get the skull of Asa Meters' brother up in the loft of Asa's home just above the fireplace. Then he watched for Asa to come home to the cabin he occupied alone.

When Asa went to the fireplace to stir up the fire, Henry Holt faced him and accuse him. Asa neither denied no affirmed the accusation. But he began to shake and tremble. In the days that followed he lost his appetite and finally just about stopped eating altogether. And as he withered away to skin and bones the suspicious neighbors explained it all by saying that when he'd try to eat, the vapor of his dead brother would grab the food away.

Asa wasn't sleeping much either. He said so. And again the every-ready and imaginative neighbors had the explanation. They said that the brother's ghost would throw itself down on top of Asa and tend to smother him. So Asa just gave up trying to go to bed at all and sat by the fire all night. At intervals he tried to beat the brother's ghost off with a hickory stick that he kept conveniently beside him.

His neighbors had seen him sitting thus, all through the night. And those of the neighbors with the most imagination reported that a gray something hovered over him all the time.

Nobody called the law from down at the county seat. Nobody even thought of such authority in connection with all these strange goings-on. Nobody had consulted the law about the suspicion of the community back when Asa's brother was killed by "falling" on the sheep-shears. Nobody felt that there was any need--then or now--of calling in the law. They saw nature administering what they considered to be true justice and they were satisfied. There may have been some connection between this attitude and the fact that many of the people who settled North Carolina's hills had strong colonial traits and a dislike for courts. British courts and British justice were among the things they and their parents had left behind when they crossed the Atlantic for America. And after getting here, their taxation experiences lad them to mistrust all authority except that of God and nature. Little brushes with the supernatural, as in the case of Asa Meters, helped that attitude along.

So, silent and leisurely, they watched and watched and watched. Almost like animal inhabitants of the mountain forests, they ringed about in a silent and undefined circle. They waited.

And it was thus that they saw Asa Meters gradually die there in his chair before the fire, fighting a ghost all night and starving to death all day.