The yard was now hung with curtains of dark shadow. Yet starglow pierced the trees and glimmered in the well water.... There was something about the well. Something.
Parl Dro moved across to it. He stood and looked over the rim and beheld his own faceless silhouette blocking out the luminous darkness of the sky. A rusty chain went down into the water. He let the impulse order him, and began to wind the chain up by its handle. The chain dragged from the bucket at its other end, and the handle creaked sourly in the quiet. His seventh sense was very definitely operating now. The bucket slapped free of the well at the same instant the house door crashed open.
There was no preliminary warning, no stir in the house that had been audible outside. One second the pool of the night lay undisturbed, the next second broken by the opened door, the dash of thin bright light thrown out across the yard from her pallid lamp.
He got the impression altogether of great pallor from the girl who stood there, a pallor that for an instant sent the familiar dazzle up his spine. But it was not quite that pallor after all. It was the bleached dress, the flaxen hair in five slim braids, three down her back, one each side of her face and looped over her ears. That, and her white skin, white hands, the right holding the narrow flame in its tube of greenish glass, the left holding the long, bared, white-shining knife.
Dro had halted the bucket, his hand still taut on the handle. He stayed like that, and watched her. He might have expected the not unnatural interrogation and bluff: Who are you? How dare you? My man will soon be here and see to you. None of that came. The girl simply yelled at him, in a shrill voice: “Get out! Go away!”
He paused a moment, letting her words hang. Then he said, pitching his own voice to carry level and clear, “Can’t I draw a drink of water from your well, first? I did knock. I thought there was no one home.”
He had a beautiful voice, marvellous diction that often worked like a charm on people, particularly women. Not on this one.
“Get out, I said. Now!”
He paused again, then let the handle go abruptly. The chain unwound with a screech and the bucket plummeted under. He did it to startle her, and so it did. The seventh sense was alert as a nerve, bristling. He walked around the well and back toward the door, toward her. He wanted to be sure, and that meant eliminating other explanations for her unfriendliness. As he went, he slipped the hood off his head. As he walked slowly, his lameness was minimized, and he was graceful. He kept his hands loose, free of the mantle, showing he had no weapon ready or considered.
Parl Dro was a remarkable looking man. Not as young, maybe, as he had been ten years before, but with an extraordinary handsomeness that had laid a velvety sombre bloom across a concert of strong features. Lips and nose, cheekbones and jaw were those of some legendary emperor on a coin. The eyes, with their fabulous impenetrable blackness, were an exact match with the long straight black fringes of hair. Characteristics, both physical and immaterial, hinted a zodiacal latitude somewhere between the earth sign of the bull and the fire sign of the serpent.
As he strolled into the light of the small lamp, the girl must see all this. See, too, the slightly cold and acid twist to the mouth that dismissed sexual immoderation and therefore threat of it, the invisible yet quite precisely ruled line that seemed to link the balance of both eyes—a mark of calculation, intelligence and control above and beyond the normal. Only a fool would judge this man robber, rapist or similar practitioner. And the girl did not seem to be a fool. Yet she was afraid, and menacing. And remained so.
As suddenly as she had thrown open the door, she slashed out with the knife in her hand.