“Was it ye a-hollerin’? Why didn’t ye cut him down, ye fool?” she demanded of Bullock, who still sat on his horse.
“Hit hain’t lawful, Granny,” said he. “Ye mustn’t cut him down.”
“I’d cut him down if I was damned fer it,” cried the old dame. “Ye coward, how long since ye seen this? When ye hollered? Was he livin’ then? Ye mought have saved his life. Git outen my way, boy,” she said to her grandson, and an instant later she herself, old as she was, had leaned far out along the branch and with a stroke of the knife she always carried had cut loose the rope. There was a thudding, sliding fall. The body of old Preacher Joslin rolled to the foot of the bank among the sodden leaves.
Bullock dismounted and stood looking down at the limp figure. But David pushed him aside.
“Leave him be,” said he, and so he slipped his arms around the body of his father, and, lifting him, strode up along the little stream bed to the home now left the more desolate and abandoned. The dead man’s mother, dry-eyed, hobbled along behind. She showed where the body might be laid.
“He hain’t daid yit, I most half believe,” said she, laying her hand on his heart. “Lay him down here, boys, on his own bed. Thar kain’t no one prove then he didn’t die in his own bed. The Gannts didn’t git him.”
If there was indeed a fluttering gasp or two at the lips after they had placed the body of Preacher Joslin upon his own bed in his own house, it was but the last that marked the passing. When not even this might be suspected, Granny Joslin broke into a sort of exalted chant of her own invention.
“I got a son!” she crooned in her shrill, high voice. “He’s strong an’ tall. He hain’t a-feared. He has the hand to kill. He’ll slay ‘em all. He’ll strow the blood. He’ll make the fight fer me an’ him an’ all of us!”
She chanted the words over and over again, the kindling of her dark eyes a fearsome thing to see. Now and again she turned from the dead man to the motionless figure of his son, who stood at his bedside.
“He’ll strow the blood,” she sang. “He’ll kill ‘em all!