“Pooh,” said Polly Ann, “he'll not come back.” Which was true. I have never laid eyes on Riley to this day.
“I reckon we'd better fetch it out of the sun,” said she, after a while. And so we dragged it under an oak, covered the face, and left it.
He was the first man I ever killed, and the business by no means came natural to me. And that day the journey-cakes which Polly Ann had made were untasted by us both. The afternoon dragged interminably. Try as we would, we could not get out of our minds the Thing that lay under the oak.
It was near sundown when Tom and Weldon appeared on the mountain side carrying a buck between them. Tom glanced from one to the other of us keenly. He was very quick to divine.
“Whar be they?” said he.
“Show him, Davy,” said Polly Ann.
I took him over to the oak, and Polly Ann told him the story. He gave me one look, I remember, and there was more of gratitude in it than in a thousand words. Then he seized a piece of cold cake from the stone.
“Which trace did he take?” he demanded of me.
But Polly Ann hung on his shoulder.
“Tom, Tom!” she cried, “you beant goin' to leave us again. Tom, he'll die in the wilderness, and we must git to Kaintuckee.”