"I air goin' now, Johnse," said Buddy. "Yo' jest lay easy like, an' I'll be back with somebuddy 'fore a goat kin wig his tail."
Whereupon, Buddy mounted the mare and galloped toward the courthouse, unafraid. In less than half an hour, Buddy galloped back, accompanied by six horsemen. They lifted the maimed, unconscious Hatfield and bore him away. As the cortège moved slowly up the moonlit road bearing their wounded leader, little Buddy turned the mare back, and cantered down toward the river to the spot where he had seen Sap McGill tumble out of the saddle when the Lutts' had fired upon him. But the boy was acutely disappointed. McGill was gone. And three bony, starved dogs with ravenous, wolfish eyes that gleamed in the moonlight, wore licking at a pool of blood in the road.
The immeasurable canopy above the hills was clear and pearly, save a narrow reef of low clouds that anchored over the serried peaks of Southpaw. Clouds frowning against the sun, grim and somber and splotched with a sable film that seemingly reflected a stratum of despair and gloom that tides of time could not erase.
Down upon the Moon mountain range, the sun smiled with an affiliating mellowness that found grateful response in the hearts of the denizens, despite the fact that the coves were scarred with new-made mounds, and their cabins were not without the wounded.
And dividing these two mighty ranges of victory and defeat, the frenzied waters of Hellsfork dinned a neutral warning, reiterating an idiom that boomed like the omen of a tom-tom.
For the past three weeks the Lutts' cabin had been utilized as an improvised hospital. Three of the men who had lingered there had departed to their respective homes, leaving Johnse Hatfield propped up in the "four-poster" alone.
Buddy Lutts' hurts, while painful and stubborn, were flesh wounds, and the boy had spurned the bed. Slab, the negro, was a willing and deft helper. And Buddy attended Johnse with the devotion born of idolization. In Buddy's boyish appreciation Johnse Hatfield was now a hero, seconded only by his dead father's memory. One bullet had gone entirely through Hatfield, leaving six lodged therein. The surgeon from Hazard had extracted every other one, leaving three inside of Johnse. The doctor did not advance any prophecies direct, because he was not interrogated, but he told the "Ridin' parson" who had been up to the Lutts' house, that in two weeks more Johnse would be up and out, a little heavier, but sound as a grind-stone.
Just at dawn each day, Johnse would open his eyes, yawn and vent an observation he had repeated regularly for three weeks:
"Well—I 'low I'll go up t' th' still long 'bout noontime, Buddy—air yo' a goin' long?—little Cap?"
Whereupon, Buddy would bring in the breakfast which old Slab had ready for him. Then Buddy would go to the "what-not" and get the treasured newspaper, and without protest, Johnse would read it all over to the boy, just as he had done each day since the paper had arrived. Logan, the audacious lawyer from the Blue-Grass, who had bearded the McGill faction in their own courthouse, had, thoughtfully, sent Johnse Hatfield a Frankfort newspaper, as a significant token of some sort of respect. The front side of this daily bore a picture, gotten up from description, of Johnse Hatfield. And under this spurious representation were three full-length columns presenting a graphic description of the "Bloodiest Clash in the History of Feudal Warfare," followed by details of the "Graveyard Massacre" by an eye-witness.