"Hit's a dollar a day."
"I reckon ye don't 'low ter pay hit, do ye?"
"I 'lowed mebby ye mout pay hit fer me, Samson."
"Ye done 'lowed plumb wrong. I come hyar ter see ef ye needed help, but hit 'pears ter me they're lettin' ye off easy."
He turned on his heel, and went back to his mule. The men behind the trees began circling again. Samson mounted, and, with his chin well up, trotted back along the main street. It was over. The question was answered. The Hollmans regarded the truce as still effective. The fact that they were permitting him to ride out alive was a wordless assurance of that. Incidentally, he stood vindicated in the eyes of his own people.
When Samson reached the mill it was ten o'clock. The men were soberer than they had been in the afternoon. McCager had seen to that. The boy replaced his exhausted mule with a borrowed mount. At midnight, as he drew near the cabin of the Widow Miller, he gave a long, low whippoorwill call, and promptly, from the shadow of the stile, a small tired figure rose up to greet him. For hours that little figure had been sitting there, silent, wide-eyed and terrified, nursing her knees in locked fingers that pressed tightly into the flesh. She had not spoken. She had hardly moved. She had only gazed out, keeping the vigil with a white face that was beginning to wear the drawn, heart-eating anxiety of the mountain woman; the woman whose code demands that she stand loyally to her clan's hatreds; the woman who has none of the man's excitement in stalking human game, which is also stalking him; the woman who must only stay at home and imagine a thousand terrors —and wait.
A rooster was crowing, and the moon had set. Only the stars were left.
"Sally," the boy reproved, "hit's most mornin', an' ye must be plumb fagged out. Why hain't you in bed?"
"I 'lowed ye'd come by hyar," she told him simply, "and I waited fer ye. I knowed whar ye had went," she added, "an' I was skeered."
"How did ye know?"