s Bible from his pocket and calmly read
such passages as might be interpreted as sure damnation for his enemies
and sure glory for himself--read them until the Judge lifted his hand
for a halt.

And so another sensation spread through the hills and a superstitious
awe of this strange new power that had come into the hills went with it
hand in hand. Only while the doubting ones knew that nothing could save
the Red Fox they would wait to see if that power could really avail
against the Tolliver clan. The day set for Rufe's execution was the
following Monday, and for the Red Fox the Friday following--for it was
well to have the whole wretched business over while the guard was there.
Old Judd Tolliver, so Hale learned, had come himself to offer the little
old woman in black the refuge of his roof as long as she lived, and had
tried to get her to go back with him to Lonesome Cove; but it pleased
the Red Fox that he should stand on the scaffold in a suit of white--cap
and all--as emblems of the purple and fine linen he was to put on above,
and the little old woman stayed where she was, silently and without
question, cutting the garments, as Hale pityingly learned, from a white
table-cloth and measuring them piece by piece with the clothes the old
man wore in jail. It pleased him, too, that his body should be kept
unburied three days--saying that he would then arise and go about
preaching, and that duty, too, she would as silently and with as little
question perform. Moreover, he would preach his own funeral sermon on
the Sunday before Rufe's day, and a curious crowd gathered to hear him.
The Red Fox was led from jail. He stood on the porch of the jailer's
house with a little table in front of him. On it lay a Bible, on the
other side of the table sat a little pale-faced old woman in black with
a black sun-bonnet drawn close to her face. By the side of the Bible lay
a few pieces of bread. It was the Red Fox's last communion--a communion
which he administered to himself and in which there was no other soul
on earth to join save that little old woman in black. And when the old
fellow lifted the bread and asked the crowd to come forward to partake
with him in the last sacrament, not a soul moved. Only the old woman who
had been ill-treated by the Red Fox for so many years--only she, of
all the crowd, gave any answer, and she for one instant turned her face
toward him. With a churlish gesture the old man pushed the bread over
towa