Shem?"

"Wyatt Trantham took 'em and he kep' 'em--he's got 'em both now."

"Does he--does he use 'em kindly?"

"I ain't never heered," said Shem simply. "He never had no young uns of
his own, and it mout be he uses 'em well. He's the high sheriff now."

"I was countin' on gittin' to see 'em agin--an buyin 'em some little
Chrismus fixin's," the father wheezed. Hopelessness was coming into his
rasping whisper. "I reckon it ain't no use to--to be thinkin'--of that
there now?"

"No 'arthly use at all," said Shem, with brutal directness. "Ef you had
the strength to git thar, the Tranthams would shoot you down like a fice
dog."

Anse nodded weakly. He sank down again on the floor, face to the boards,
coughing hard. It was the droning voice of his cousin that brought him
back from the borders of the coma he had been fighting off for hours.

For, to Shem, the best hater and the poorest fighter of all his
cleaned-out clan, had come a great thought. He shook the drowsing man
and roused him, and plied him with sips from a dipper of the unhallowed
white corn whisky of a mountain still-house. And as he worked over him
he told off the tally of the last four years: of the uneven, unmerciful
war, ticking off on his blunt finger ends the grim totals of this one
ambushed and that one killed in the open, overpowered and beaten under
by weight of odds. He told such details as he knew of the theft of the
young wife and the young ones, Elvira and little Anderson.

"Anse, did ary Trantham see you a-gittin' here tonight?"

"Nobody--that knowed me--seed me."

"Old Wyatt Trantham, he rid into Manchester this evenin' 'bout fo'
o'clock--I seed him passin' over the ridge," went on Shem. "He'll be
ridin' back 'long Pigeon Roost some time before mawnin'. He done you a
heap o' dirt, Anse."

The prostrate man was listening hard.

"Anse, I got yore old rifle right here in the house. Ef you could git up
thar on the mounting, somewhar's alongside the Pigeon Roost trail, you
could git him shore. He'll be full of licker comin' back."

And now a seeming marvel was coming to pass, for the caved-in trunk was
rising on the pipestem legs and the shaking fingers were outstretched,
reaching for something.

Shem stepped lightly to a corner of the cabin and brought forth a rifle
and began reloading it afresh from a box of shells.

* * * * *

A wavering figure crept across the small stump-dotted "dead'ning"--Anse
Dug