For, to Shem, the best hater and the poorest fighter of all his cleaned-out clan, had come a great thought. He shook the drowsing man and roused him, and plied him with sips from a dipper of the unhallowed white corn whisky of a mountain still-house. And as he worked over him he told off the tally of the last four years: of the uneven, unmerciful war, ticking off on his blunt finger ends the grim totals of this one ambushed and that one killed in the open, overpowered and beaten under by weight of odds. He told such details as he knew of the theft of the young wife and the young ones, Elvira and little Anderson.
“Anse, did ary Trantham see you a-gittin' here tonight?”
“Nobody—that knowed me—seed me.”
“Old Wyatt Trantham, he rid into Manchester this evenin' 'bout fo' o'clock—I seed him passin' over the ridge,” went on Shem. “He'll be ridin' back 'long Pigeon Roost some time before mawnin'. He done you a heap o' dirt, Anse.”
The prostrate man was listening hard.
“Anse, I got yore old rifle right here in the house. Ef you could git up thar on the mounting, somewhar's alongside the Pigeon Roost trail, you could git him shore. He'll be full of licker comin' back.”
And now a seeming marvel was coming to pass, for the caved-in trunk was rising on the pipestem legs and the shaking fingers were outstretched, reaching for something.
Shem stepped lightly to a corner of the cabin and brought forth a rifle and began reloading it afresh from a box of shells.
A wavering figure crept across the small stump-dotted “dead'ning”—Anse Dugmore was upon his errand. He dragged the rifle by the barrel, so that its butt made a crooked, broken furrow in the new snow like the trail of a crippled snake. He fell and got up, and fell and rose again. He coughed and up the ridge a ranging dog-fox barked back an answer to his cough.