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“But my wife–did she—-“

“I thought maybe you’d heered tell about that whilst you was down yon,” said Shem in a dulled wonder. “The fall after you was took away yore woman she went over to the Tranthams. Yes, sir; she took up with the head devil of ’em all–old Wyatt Trantham hisself–and she went to live at his house up on the Yaller Banks.”

“Is she—-Did she—-“

The ex-convict was struggling to his knees. His groping skeletons of hands were right in the hot ashes. The heat cooked the moisture from his sodden garments in little films of vapor and filled the cabin with the reek of the prison dye.

“Did she–did she—-“

“Oh, she’s been dead quite a spell now,” stated Shem. “I would have s’posed you’d ‘a’ heered that, too, somewhars. She had a kind of a risin’ in the breast.”

“But my young uns–little Anderson and–and Elviry?”

The sick man was clear up on his knees now, his long arms hanging and his eyes, behind their matted lids, fixed on Shem’s impassive face. Could the warden have seen him now, and marked his attitude and his words, he would have known what it was that had brought this dying man back to his own mountain valley with the breath of life still in him. A dumb, unuttered love for the two shock-headed babies he had left behind in the split-board cabin was the one big thing in Anse Dugmore’s whole being–bigger even than his sense of allegiance to the feud.

“My young uns, Shem?”

“Wyatt Trantham took ’em and he kep’ ’em–he’s got ’em both now.”

“Does he–does he use ’em kindly?”

“I ain’t never heered,” said Shem simply. “He never had no young uns of his own, and it mout be he uses ’em well. He’s the high sheriff now.”

“I was countin’ on gittin’ to see ’em agin–an buyin ’em some little Chrismus fixin’s,” the father wheezed. Hopelessness was coming into his rasping whisper. “I reckon it ain’t no use to–to be thinkin’–of that there now?”

“No ‘arthly use at all,” said Shem, with brutal directness. “Ef you had the strength to git thar, the Tranthams would shoot you down like a fice dog.”

Anse nodded weakly. He sank down again on the floor, face to the boards, coughing hard. It was the droning voice of his cousin that brought him back from the borders of the coma he had been fighting off for hours.

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.