CHAPTER VIII. LIFE’S NIGHT WATCH.
It was a dull, wintry day; blank, ashen sky above—grassland, sere and stark, below. Weedy stubble wore shrouding of black; everything was still—so still, even the birds yet drowsed upon their perch, nor stirred a wing or throat to enliven the depressing wood. A soiled and sullen snowdrift lay dankly by a road that had fallen into disuse. It was crossed now for the first time, maybe, in a full year. A young woman tramped her way along the silent waste to a log shanty. Frozen drifts of the late snow lay packed as they had fallen on the door sill.
She rapped at the door and bent her head to listen; then she rattled it vigorously, and still no answer. She tried the latch, it yielded, and she entered. The light inside was so dim that it was hard at first to make out what was about her. Two hickory logs lay smouldering in a bank of ashes. She stirred the poor excuse for fire, and put on some smaller sticks that lay by the wide fireplace. By this time her eyes had become accustomed to the dimness, and she looked about her. There were a few splint-bottomed chairs, a “safe,” a table, and a bed covered with patched bedding and old clothes, and under these—in a flash she was by the bed and had pushed away the covering at the top.
“She is dead,” Cherokee heard herself say aloud, in a voice that sounded not at all her own; but no, there was a feeble flicker of pulse at the shrunken wrist that she instinctively fumbled for under the bed clothes.
“Mammy wake up! I have come to see you—it’s Cherokee, wake up!” she called.
The faintest stir of life passed over the brown old face, and she opened her eyes. It did not seem as though she saw her or anything else. Her shrivelled lips moved, emitting some husky, unintelligible sounds. Cherokee leaned nearer, and strained her ears to catch these terrible words:
“Starvin’—don’t—tell—my—chile.”
With a cry she sprang to her feet; the things to be done in this awful situation mapped themselves with lightning swiftness before her brain; she started the fire to blazing, with chips and more wood that somehow was already there. Then she opened the lunch she had been thoughtful enough to bring; there was chicken, and crackers, and bread. She seized a skillet, warmed the food, hurried back to the bed, and fed the woman as though she had been a baby.