A half-hour later old Jase Burrell drew rein by the stile and handed Dorothy a letter.
"I reckon thet's ther one ye've been waitin' fer," he said, "so I fetched hit over from ther post-office. What's ther matter, gal? Ye looks like ye'd been seein' hants."
"I hain't seed nothin' else fer days past," she declared, almost hysterically. "I've done sickened with waitin', Uncle Jase, an' I aimed ter start out soon termorrer mornin', letter or no letter."
CHAPTER XXVIII
Across in Virginia, Sally Turk, the wife of the dead man and the sister of the accused, had rocked her anæmic baby to sleep after a long period of twilight fretfulness and stood looking down into its crib awhile with a distrait and numbed face of distress. She was leaving it to the care of another and did not know when she would come back.
"I'm right glad leetle Ken's done tuck ter ther bottle," she said with forced cheerfulness to the hag-like Mirandy Sloane. "Mebby when I gits back thar'll be a mite more flesh on them puny leetle bones of his'n." Her words caught sob-like in her throat as she wheeled resolutely and caught up her shawl and bonnet.
Out at the tumble-down stable she saddled and mounted a mule that plodded with a limp through a blackness like a sea of freezing ink, and she shivered as she sat in the old carpet-cushioned side-saddle and flapped a long switch monotonously upon the flanks of her "ridin'-critter."
The journey she was undertaking lay toward the town where her brother was "hampered" in jail, but she turned at a cross-road two miles short of that objective and kept to the right until she came to a two-storied house set in an orchard: a place of substantial and commodious size. Its windows were shuttered now and it loomed only as a squarish block of denser shadow against the formless background of night. All shapes were neutralized under a clouded and gusty sky.