She gave him a bleak little smile. "My dear boy, if I had left all the hard things to my manager to do, Storm to-day would be just where Basil Kildare left it."
She cantered back along the road and turned up a weed-grown lane, her face set and frowning. Despite her words to Benoix, at times like this she felt a very feminine need of a man, and scorned herself for the feeling.
Coming to a whitewashed log-cabin overgrown with morning-glories—the only crop the shiftless Hendersons had been able to raise—she pounded on the closed door with the butt of her crop. She heard a faint sound within, but nobody came to answer.
"I hear you in there. Don't keep me waiting, Mag."
Still no answer. But once again the faint sound came. It might have been the whining of an animal.
Mrs. Kildare jumped impatiently from her horse, and a few well-aimed blows of fist and knee sent the frail lock flying. The door was barricaded within by a bureau and a table and chairs—Mag's poor little defense, evidently, against the "Possum-Hunters."
"Where are you, my girl?" demanded Mrs. Kildare less impatiently, pushing her way to the back room. "It's not night-riders. It's the Madam."
A little slim creature, hardly more than a child, writhed on a cot in the corner, her eyes bright and fixed like the eyes of a rabbit Kate had once seen caught in a trap, both fists stuffed into her mouth to stifle the groans that burst out in spite of them.
"Git out!" the girl panted fiercely. "Lemme be! I don' want none of ye 'round, not none of ye. You go way from here!"
The change in Mrs. Kildare's face was wonderful. "Why, child, what's the matter?" she said gently, even as she stripped off her gauntlets. For she knew very well what was the matter. In a widely separated rural community where doctors and nurses are scarce, the word "neighbor" becomes more than a mere honorary title.