l murmured
the last echoes of the pistol's bellowing, and it seemed a voice of
everlasting duration to the shock-sickened nerves of those within.

First it had thundered with the deafening exaggeration of confined
space, then its echo had beaten against the clay-chink wall timbers and
rolled upward to the rafters. Now, dwindled to a ghostly whisper, it
lingered and persisted.

But the house stood isolated, and outside the laurelled forests and
porous cliffs soaked up the dissonance as a blotter soaks ink.

The picture seen through the open door, had there been any to see, was
almost as motionless as a tableau, and it was a starkly grim one, with
murky shadows against a fitful light. A ray of the setting sun forced
its inquisitive way inward upon the semi-darkness of the interior. A red
wavering from the open hearth, where supper preparations had been going
forward, threw unsteady patches of fire reflection outward. In the
pervading smell of dead smoke from a blackened chimney hung the more
pungent sharpness of freshly burned gun-powder, and the man standing
near the door gazed downward, with a dazed stare, at the floor by his
feet, where lay the pistol which gave forth that acrid stench.

Across from him in the dead silence--dead save for the lingering of the
echo's ghost--stood the woman, her hands clutched to her thin bosom, her
eyes stunned and dilated, her body wavering on legs about to buckle in
collapse.

On the puncheon floor between them stretched the woman's husband. The
echo had outlasted his life and, because the muzzle had almost touched
his breast, he sprawled in a dark welter that was still spreading.

His posture was so uncouth and grotesque as to filch from death its
rightful dignity, and his face was turned downward.

The interminability of the tableau existed only in the unfocussed minds
of the two living beings to whom the consequence of this moment was not
measurable in time. Then from the woman's parted lips came a long,
strangling moan that mounted to something like a muffled shriek. She
remained a moment rocking on her feet, then wheeled and stumbled toward
the quilt-covered four-poster bed in one dark corner of the cabin. Into
its feather billows she flung herself and lay with her fingernails
digging into her temples and her body racked with the incoherencies of
hysteria.

The man stooped to pick up the pistol and walked slowly over to the
rough table where he laid it down noiselessly, a