In front of the McNamor homestead several women were to be seen running up and down the grassy sward, frantically[frantically] waving red and green shawls. What could they mean? They were so vehement that Oscar divined something was wrong, and steered ashore, followed by McMeans, who, noting the absence of Anna from the signaling party[party], feared that a mishap had befallen her.
Both young men jumped ashore almost simultaneously, leaving their rafts to their helpers. The worst had happened–Anna was in the house with a fractured skull, and the doctors[doctors] said she could not live the night. If anything, McMeans turned the paler of the two. The men said little as they followed the women up the boardwalk to the house.
That night McMeans, who asked to be allowed to remain until the outcome[outcome] of the case, for the river had lost its attractions, was sitting in the kitchen with Grandmother McClinton. The raw air had blown itself into a gale after sundown, and during the night the fierce wind beat about the eaves and corners of the house like an avenging fury. The old tall clock, made years before by John Vanderslice, of Reading, on top of which was a stuffed Colishay, or gray fox, with an uncommonly fine brush, was striking twelve. Amid the storm a wailing voice joined in the din, incessantly, so that there was no mistaking it, the Warning of the McClintons.
RUINS OF FORT BARNET. BUILT IN 1740. (Photograph Taken 1895.)
The old grandmother watched McMeans’[McMeans’] face until she saw that he understood. Then she nodded to him. "It is strange how that thing has followed the McClinton family for hundreds of years. In Scotland it was their ‘Caointeach’, in Ireland their ‘Banshee’, in Pennsylvania their ‘Token’ or ‘Warning’. It never fails."
As McMeans listened to the terrible shrieks of anguish, which sometimes drowned the storm, he shivered with pity for the lost soul out there in the cold, giving the death message, so melancholy and sad, and perhaps unwillingly. Anna lay upstairs in her room, facing the river, or windward side of the house, and the Warning was evidently somewhere below her window, where the water in waves like the sea, was over-running the banks.
On a kitchen chair still lay a red Paisley shawl that had been used to signal to Wellendorf earlier in the day. It seemed ample and warm. Picking it up, McMeans went to the kitchen door, which he opened with some effort in the force of the gale, and, walking around the house, laid it on one of the benches at the front door, saying, “Put on this shawl, and come around to the leeward side of the house.”
When he returned, he said to Grandmother McClinton, “That Token’s voice touched me somehow tonight. Something tells me she hated her task, is cold and miserable. I left the shawl on the front porch and told her to come out of the wind.”
After that they both noticed that the unhappy wailings ceased, there was nothing that vied with the storm.