CHAPTER TWOCHAPTER Nine
After crossing the Hudson at Poughkeepsie the big Hutter car travelled north-west. It followed an excellent highway through the town of Bethea, and then bore off to the left and rolled sixteen miles into mountain country. Beyond the village of Erasmus (fourteen houses, a*****e, a church, and a handsome library) it turned left again, to proceed with due caution along a dirt road harrowed by winter storms. Gamadge looked out at the landscape that he had once known so well; at the hillsides covered with immemorial hemlock, the later growths of beech and maple in the valleys, the rocky fields and brown streams. Strange, wild country; haunted country in the past, when no Indian would camp where the hemlocks made day into night. Haunted country still, legend declared, on
