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my skull, burrowed down under a blanket of hair, clinging to my curls and sleeping as peaceful as a baby.
    "Emily Robbins' folks said she was planning on cutting through the swamp," the Sheriff told me. "We followed the tire tracks up to the old quicksand."
    Enoch had forgotten about the tracks. So what could I say? Besides.
    "Anything you say can be used agin you," said Sheriff Shelby. "Come on, Seth."
    I went with him. There was nothing else for me to do. I went with him into town, and all the loafers were out trying to rush the car. There were women in the crowd too. They kept yelling for the men to "get" me.
    But Sheriff Shelby held them off, and at last I was tucked away safe and sound in the back of the jailhouse. He locked me up in the middle cell. The two cells on each side of mine were vacant, so I was all alone. All alone except for Enoch, and he slept through everything.
    It was still pretty early in the morning, and Sheriff Shelby went out again with some other men. I guess he was going to try and get the body out of the quicksand, if he could. He didn't try to ask any questions, and I wondered about that.
    Charley Potter, now, he was different. He wanted to know everything. Sheriff Shelby had left him in charge of the jail while he was away. He brought me my breakfast after a while, and hung around asking questions.
    I just kept still. I knew better than to talk to a fool like Charley Potter. He thought I was crazy. Just like the mob outside. Most people in that town thought I was crazy—because of my mother, I suppose, and because of the way I lived all alone out in the swamp.
    What could I say to Charley Potter? If I told him about Enoch he'd never believe me anyway.
    So I didn't talk.
    I listened.
    Then Charley Potter told me about the search for Emily Robbins, and about how Sheriff Shelby got to wondering over some other disappearances a while back. He said that there would be a big trial, and the District Attorney was coming down from the County Seat. And he'd heard they were sending out a doctor to see me right away.
    Sure enough, just as I finished breakfast, the doctor came. Charley Potter saw him drive up and let him in. He had to work fast to keep some of the oafs from breaking in with him. They wanted to lynch me, I suppose. But the doctor came in all right—a little man with one of those funny beards on his chin—and he made Charley Potter go up front into the office while he sat down outside the cell and talked to me.
    His name was Dr. Silversmith.
    Now up to this tune, I wasn't really feeling anything. It had all happened so fast I didn't get a chance to think.
    It was like part of a dream; the Sheriff and the mob and all this talk about a trial and lynching and the body in the swamp.
    But somehow the sight of this Dr. Silversmith changed things.
    He was real, all right. You could tell he was a doctor who wanted to send me to the Institution after they found my mother.
    That was one of the first things Dr. Silversmith asked me—what had happened to my mother?
    He seemed to know quite a lot about me, and that made it easier for me to talk.
    Pretty soon I found myself telling him all sorts of things. How my mother and I lived in the shack. How she made the philters and sold them. About the big pot and the way we gathered herbs at night. About the nights when she went off alone and I would hear the queer noises from far away.
    I didn't want to say much more, but he knew, anyway. He knew they had called her a witch. He even knew the way she died—when Santo Dinorelli came to our door that evening and stabbed her because she had made the potion for his daughter who ran away with that trapper. He knew about me living in the swamp alone after that, too.
    But he didn't know about Enoch.
    Enoch, up on top of my head all the time, still sleeping, not knowing or caring what was happening to me . . .
    Somehow, I was talking to Dr. Silversmith about Enoch. I wanted to explain that it wasn't really I who had