[
 {
  "chunk": 267,
  "story": 23,
  "summary": "Among restless frontier settlers who kept moving west, one silent man stayed on alone in a log house in the forest, living by selling skins and letting his once-cleared land go back to wilderness.",
  "predicament": "Someone stays on alone in a place everyone else has left, never smiling and never saying why they stay."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 268,
  "story": 23,
  "summary": "His cabin has a single window, boarded up for as long as anyone remembers; he looks seventy but is fifty, aged by something besides years. The narrator heard his story from his grandfather.",
  "predicament": "Someone aged by an old grief keeps one part of their home shut up for good, and nobody knows the reason."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 269,
  "story": 23,
  "summary": "He is found dead and buried beside his long-dead wife. Years earlier he had come west young and hopeful with a devoted wife who shared every hardship gladly.",
  "predicament": "Someone who came to a hard, lonely place full of hope with the person they loved is left there alone."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 270,
  "story": 23,
  "summary": "He came home to find his wife delirious with fever, far from any help; after three days of nursing she seemed to die. Numb, he prepares her for burial, fumbling, surprised he cannot weep, telling himself it must be all right.",
  "predicament": "Someone alone and far from help watches the person they love die, and is too numb to believe it."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 271,
  "story": 23,
  "summary": "Stupefied by grief, he finishes laying her out and sits by the body with his head on the table; a wailing cry like a lost child sounds from the woods, and he falls asleep.",
  "predicament": "Someone keeping watch alone over a loved one's body is too exhausted by grief to stay awake."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 272,
  "story": 23,
  "summary": "He wakes in total darkness and hears soft bare footsteps; paralysed with terror, he cannot speak her name. Something crashes against the table and falls, there is a struggle, and when he reaches across, the body is gone.",
  "predicament": "Someone alone in the dark with the dead hears something moving near the body, and is too terrified to act."
 },
 {
  "chunk": 273,
  "story": 23,
  "summary": "Mad with terror he fires his rifle blindly and by the flash sees a panther dragging his wife toward the window; at dawn he finds her throat torn, her fists clenched and a piece of the animal's ear between her teeth. She had not been dead.",
  "predicament": "Someone who gave up the person they loved for dead learns too late that they were alive and fighting for their life."
 }
]