The old man was gazing meditatively at it as he said, reprehensively, “’Pears like ter me, Hil’ry, ez ye oughter be thankful ye warn’t killed utterly—ye oughter be thankful it air no wuss.”
“Hil’ry ain’t thankful fur haffen o’ nuthin’.” Mrs. Knox interposed. “’Twar jes’ las’ night he looked like su’thin’ in a trap. He walked the floor till nigh day—till I jes’ tuk heart o’ grace an’ told him ez his dad bed laid them puncheons ter last, an’ not to be walked on till they were wore thinner’n a clapboard in one night. An’ yit he air alive an’ hearty, an’ I hev got my son agin. An’ I sets ez much store by him with one arm ez two.”
And indeed she looked cheerfully about the dusky landscape as she rose, rolling the sock on her needles and thrusting them into the ball of yarn. Old Jonas Scruggs hesitated when she told him alluringly that she had a “mighty nice ash cake kivered on the h’a’th,” but he said that his daughter-in-law, Jerusha, would be expecting him, and he could in no wise bide to supper. And finally he started homeward a little wistful, but serene in the consciousness of having obeyed the behests of Jerusha, who in these hard times had grown sensitive about his habit of taking meals with his friends. “As ef,” she argued, “I fed ye on half rations at home.”
Hilary rose at last from the doorstep, and turning slowly to go within, his absent glance swept the night-shadowed scene. He paused suddenly, and his heart seemed beating in his throat.
A point of red light had sprung up in the vague glooms. A will-o’-the-wisp?—some wavering “ghost’s candle” to light him to his grave. With his accurate knowledge of the locality he sought to place it. The distant gleam seemed to shine from a window of the old hotel, and this bespoke the arrival of rude occupants. He heard a wild halloo, a snatch of song perhaps—or was it fancy? And were the iterative echoes in the gorge the fancy of the stern old crags?
For the first time since he returned, maimed and helpless, and a non-combatant, were the lawless marauders quartered at the old hotel.
He stood for a while gazing at it with dilated eyes. Then he silently stepped within the cabin and barred the door with his uncertain and awkward left hand.
The cheerful interior of the house was all aglow. The fire had been mended, and yellow flames were undulating about the logs with many a gleaming line of grace. Blue and purple and scarlet flashes they showed in fugitive iridescence. They illumined his face, and his mother noted its pallor—the deep pallor which he had brought from the hospital.
“Ye hev got yer fancies ag’in,” she cried. Then with anxious curiosity, “Whar be yer right hand now, Hil’ry?”
She alluded to that cruel hallucination of sensation in an amputated arm.