“Ah, Libby!” protested Isobel, shrinking from the mention of such poignancy. Jennie Price was the six-year-old who had been lost in the grasses, wandering from her home some twenty miles down the creek, a year or two ago. What but that had all the women been thinking of all the day and shrinking from mentioning.
Libby was groping about for her shoes which she had left in the kitchen.
“Just near home, Isobel! Forty yards from her mother’s door.”
“You can’t go out by night, Libby. You can’t stand up!”
“Crawling towards home, it may be.”
“Libby! Libby!” cried Isobel, getting up. Forty yards from home they had found the girlish skeleton the next spring, in a place a hundred men would swear in court they had sought through dozens of times. The mother herself had come upon it. Had the child been stolen away for some evil purpose, and flung back later to die? No one would ever know.
“The wee bones were all white, Isobel!”
“Spare us, Libby! Peter’s a man grown!”
The women went out calling down the road together. At dawn, when John McCreath came out to milk, while yet the stars were shining, he heard Libby calling hoarsely, “Lammie! Lammie! Your mother’s coming!”