checked apron, thrown over her head, wherewith to mop her tears.
The other, much younger, her fair face reddened, her blue eyes swollen,
her auburn curling hair all tangled on her shoulders, her voice
half-choked with sobs, addressed herself to the narration of their woes,
her cold, listless hands clasped about her knees as she sat on an
inverted bushel-basket, for there was not a whole chair in the room.

"An' then he jes' tuk an' leveled!" she faltered.

A young hunter standing on the threshold, leaning on his rifle, a brace
of wild turkeys hanging over his shoulders, half a dozen rabbits
dangling from his belt, stared at her through the dull, red glow of the
fading fire in amazed agitation.

"What did he level, Medory--a gun?"

"Wuss'n that!" replied the younger woman. "He leveled the weepon o' the
law!"

The man turned to look again at the curious disarray of the room. "The
law don't allow him to do sech ez this!" he blurted out in rising anger.
"Why, everything hyar is bodaciously broke an' busted! War it the
sheriff himself ez levied?"

"'Twar jes' the dep'ty critter, Clem Tweed," explained Medora, "mighty
jokified, an' he 'peared ter be middlin' drunk, an' though he said
su'thin' 'bout exemptions he 'lowed ez we-uns lived at the eend o' the
world."

Her mother-in-law suddenly lowered the apron from her face.

"'The jumpin'-off place,' war what Clem Tweed called it!" she
interpolated with a fiery eye of indignant reminiscence.

"He did! He did!" Medora bitterly resented this fling at the remoteness
of their poor home. "An' he said whilst hyar he'd level on everything in
sight, ez he hoped never ter travel sech roads agin--everything in
sight, even the baby an' the cat!"

"Shucks, Medory, ye know the dep'ty man war funnin' whenst he said that
about the baby an' the cat! Ye know ez Clem admitted he hed Christmas in
his bones!" the elder objected.

"Waal, war Clem Tweed funnin' whenst he done sech ez that, in levyin' an
execution?" Bruce Gilhooley pointed with his ramrod at the wreck of the
furniture.

The two women burst into lugubrious sobs and rocked themselves back and
forth in unison. "'Twar _Dad_!" Medora moaned, in smothered accents.

A pause of bewilderment ensued. Then the young man's face took on an
expression of dismay so ominous that Medora's tears were checked in the
ghastly fear of disasters yet to come to her father-in-law. Now and
again she glanced anxiously over her shoulder at an obl