She clambered across the Gulch, her tired horse stumbling with drooping head over the familiar stones, and rode slowly up to the home place. The huddle of buildings looked gaunt, deserted, inhospitable. There was light here enough to see the life which in daytime made all homelike, but which now, quenched and hidden, left all desolate, forbidding. As sleep takes on the semblance of death, so the sleeping house took on the semblance of desertion. The chickens were still humped on their perches in the trees, the cows had not come up to the milking-pen, their calves lay in a little bunch by the fence fast asleep. To the girl’s heavy heart it seemed a spot utterly forlorn in the chill, sad, ironic half-light of the slow-coming morning.
She rode directly to the barn, unsaddled, and put her horse out. As she was coming back past her uncle’s cabin, she saw the old man himself sitting in the door. He was fully dressed; his hat lay on the doorstone beside him, and against the jamb leaned Old Sister. He looked up at her with a sort of indifferent, troubled gaze.
“So you got back, Jude,” he said quietly.
“Yes, Uncle Jep,” she returned as quietly.
He made no comment on her riding skirt which she held up away from the drenching dew. He asked no questions as to where she had been, or what her errand. She noted that he looked old and worn.
“I’m mighty sorry it happened,” he began abruptly, quite as though he was continuing a conversation which they had intermitted but a few moments, “mighty sorry; but I don’t see no other way. I’ve studied a heap on it. Folks that stirs up trouble, gits trouble. I——”
He broke off and sat brooding.
“I’m glad you ain’t mad at me for the part I’ve tuck in it,” Judith began finally.
“Don’t tell me.” He raised a hasty, protesting hand. “I don’t want to know nothin’ about it. All is, I couldn’t have things according to my ruthers, and they had to go as they must. Hit ain’t what a man means that makes the differ—hit’s what he does that we count. Them that stirs up trouble, finds trouble.”
“I reckon so, Uncle Jep,” said the girl, drooping as she stood.