Old Jephthah was winding the clock when the door—which he had closed some time ago after the last retiring guests—flung violently open, Andy paused, flying foot on the threshold, and gasped out hoarsely,
“Pap—Creed Bonbright’s killed Blatch and got away from us!”
The Lusk girls had staid to help Judith clear up, intending to remain over night unless Andy and Jeff returned in time to take them home. The three young women working at the table lifted pale faces; Pendrilla let fall the plate in her hand and broke it. Unconscious of the fact, she stood staring with open mouth at the fragments by her feet. Jephthah took one more turn mechanically, then withdrew the key and laid it down.
“Whar at?” he inquired briefly.
“Up on our place,” said Wade who now appeared at the boy’s side. “Bonbright throwed him over Foeman’s Bluff.”
“How come it?” queried the head of the tribe.
“They was a fussin’,” began Andy, but his father interrupted him in a curious tone.
“Foeman’s Bluff,” he repeated. “What tuck Bonbright thar at this time o’ night?”
“That’s what I say,” panted Jim Cal’s voice in the darkness outside. He had come straight from the still instead of going with Jeff and the others to search; and for all his flesh he had overtaken his brothers. But there was none now to demand sardonically why he fled the seat of war and ran to the paternal shelter for re-enforcements. “Ef folks go nosin’ around whar they ain’t wanted, sometimes they git what they don’t like,” he concluded.
Judith, very pale, had parted her lips to utter words of indignant defence, and denial of this broad imputation, but before she could speak Huldah Spiller irrupted into the room, her red curls flying, her bodice clutched about her in such a fashion as to suggest she had been undressing when the news reached her.