Allen
moved and cried out in a knifelike agony, and a flicker of suffering
passed over his father's face.
An intolerable hour dragged out before the doctor arrived; and then
David was driven from the room. He sat outside on the portico,
listening to the passage of feet about Allen in a high shuddering
protest. David's hands and feet were still cold, but he was conscious
of an increasing stillness within, an attitude not unlike his father's.
He held out an arm and saw that it was as steady as a beam of the stoop
roof. He was without definite plan or knowledge of what must occur; but
he told himself that any decision of Hunter Kinemon's must not exclude
him.
There were four Hatburns; but two Kinemons were better; and he meant
his father and himself, for he knew instinctively that Allen was badly
hurt. Soon there would be no Hatburns at all. And then the law could do
as it pleased. It seemed to David a long way from the valley, from
Allen broken in bed, to the next term of court--September--in
Crabapple. The Kinemons could protect, revenge, their own.
The doctor passed out, and David entered where his mother was bent
above her elder son. Hunter Kinemon, with a blackened rag, was wiping
the lock of an old but efficient repeating rifle. His motions were
unhurried, careful. Mrs. Kinemon gazed at him with blanching lips, but
she interposed no word. There was another rifle, David knew, in the
long cupboard by the hearth; and he was moving to secure it when his
father's voice halted him in the middle of the floor.
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