t despair, with the ignominy of a
criminal accusation, with all the sordid concomitants of arrest and the
jail, was infinitely terrible to his unaccustomed imagination. He
revolted from its contemplation with a personal application. For an
honest man, however poor, feels all the high prerogatives of honor.

There was a step in the shed-room where Ross Gilhooley had lurked and
listened. His wrath now spent, his mind had traveled the obvious course
to his son's conclusion. He stood a gigantic, bearded shadow in the
doorway, half ashamed, wholly repentant, dimly, vaguely fearful, and all
responsive and quivering to the idea of flight. "I been studyin' some
'bout goin' ter Minervy Sue's in Georgy," he said creakingly, as if his
voice had suffered from its unwonted disuse.

"An' none too soon," said Bruce doggedly. "The oxen is Medory's, bein'
lef' ter her whenst her dad died, an' the wagin is mine! Quit foolin'
along o' that thar fire, Medory!" For with her bright hair hanging
curling over her cheeks his young wife had leaned forward to start it
anew.

"Never ter kindle it agin on this ha'th-stone!" she cried with a
poignant realization of the significance of the uprooting of the
roof-tree and the wide, vague world without. And still once more the two
women fell to bemoaning their fate of exile beside the expiring embers,
while the elder Gilhooley's voice sounded bluffly outside calling the
oxen, and his son was rattling their heavy yoke in the corner.

They were well advanced on their journey ere yet the snowy Christmas
dawn was in the sky. So slow a progress was ill-associated with the idea
of flight. It was almost noiseless--the great hoofs of the oxen fell all
muffled on the deep snow still whitely a-glitter with the moon, hanging
dense and opaque in the western sky, and flecked with the dendroidal
images of the overshadowing trees. The immense bovine heads swayed to
and fro, cadenced to the deliberate pace, and more than once a muttered
low of distaste and protest rose with the vapor curling upward from lip
and nostril into the icy air. On the front seat of the cumbrous, white,
canvas-covered vehicle was Medora, her bright hair blowing out from the
folds of a red shawl worn hood-wise; she held a cord attached to the
horns of one of the oxen by which she sought to guide the yoke in those
intervals when her husband, who walked by their side with a goad, must
needs fall to the rear to drive up a cow and calf. Inside th