At the sound of his voice she started and rose. Going to him, she took the child and went out of the room. As she did so, Sandy noticed that a portion of her dress was torn away. He remarked it with wonder, as well as her disordered hair. It was not like Molly at all; but he said nothing, putting this unusual negligence down to that general "cur'usness" of womankind which was past finding out.
The next day and the next passed away. Sandy went in and out, silent and unobtrusive, but with his heart full of sickening fears. A half-formed doubt of his wife's sanity—a doubt which her strange, fitful conduct during these days, and her wild and haggard looks only served to confirm—haunted him persistently. He could not work, but wandered about, restless and unhappy beyond measure.
On the third day, as he sat, moody and wretched, upon the fence of the corn-field, Jim Barker, his neighbor from the other side of the mountain, came along, and asked Sandy to join him on a hunting excursion. He snatched at the idea, hoping to escape for a time from the insupportable thoughts he could not banish, and went up to the cabin for his gun. As he took it down, Molly's eyes followed him.
"Where are ye goin', Sandy?" she asked.
"With Jim, fur a little shootin'," was the answer; "ye don't mind, Molly?"
She came to him and laid her head upon his shoulder, and, as he looked down upon her face, he was newly startled at its pinched and sunken aspect.
"No, Sandy, I don't mind," she said, with the old gentleness in her tones. She returned his caress, clinging to his neck, and with reluctance letting him go. He remembered this in after times, and even now it moved him strangely, and he turned more than once to look back upon the slender figure, which stood watching him until he joined his companion and passed out of sight.
An impulse she could not resist compelled her gaze to follow them—to leap beyond them, till it rested upon the Devil's Ledge, a huge mass of rocks which frowned above the gorge. Along these rocks, at intervals, towered great pines, weather-beaten, lightning-stricken, stretching out giant arms, which seemed to beckon, and point down the sheer sides of the precipice into the abyss at its foot, where a flock of buzzards wheeled slowly and heavily about. The woman's very lips grew white as she looked, and she turned shuddering away, only to return, again and again, as the slow hours lagged and lingered. The sunshine crept across the floor never so slowly, and passed at length away; and, just as the sun was setting, Sandy's tall form appeared, coming up the slope. Against the red sky his face stood out, white, rigid, terrible. It was not her husband; it was Fate, advancing. The woman tried to smile. Poor mockery of a smile, it died upon her lips. The whole landscape—the green forests, purple hills and gray rocks—swam before her eyes in a lurid mist; only the face of her husband—that was distinct with an awful distinctness. On he came, and stood before her. He leaned his gun against the side of the cabin, and placed the hand which had held it upon the lintel over her head; the other was in his breast. There was a terrible deliberation in all his movements, and he breathed heavily and painfully. It seemed to her an eternity that he stood thus, looking down upon her. Then he spoke.
"Thar's a dead man—over thar—under the ledge!"
The woman neither moved nor spoke. He drew his hand from his breast and held something toward her; it was the missing fragment torn from her dress.