Only then he realized that he was
looking at death. The pain in his father's back had got him at last!
The rifle had been carefully placed against the wall; and, without
realizing the significance of his act, David picked it up and laid the
cold barrel against his rigid young body.
IV
On the evening after Hunter Kinemon's burial in the rocky steep
graveyard above Crabapple, David and his mother sat, one on the couch,
the other in her creaking rocking-chair, lost in heavy silence. Allen
moved in a perpetual uneasy pain on the bed, his face drawn and
fretful, and shadowed by a soft young beard. The wardrobe doors stood
open, revealing a stripped interior; wooden chairs were tied back to
back; and two trunks--one of mottled paper, the other of ancient
leather--stood by the side of a willow basket filled with a miscellany
of housekeeping objects.
What were left of the Kinemons were moving into a small house on the
edge of Crabapple; Senator Galt had already secured another tenant for
the care of his bottom acres and fat herds. The night swept into the
room, fragrant and blue, powdered with stars; the sheep bells sounded
in a faintly distant clashing; a whippoorwill beat its throat out
against the piny dark.
An overpowering melancholy surged through David; though his youth
responded to the dramatic, the tragic change that had enveloped them,
at the same time he was reluctant to leave the farm, the valley with
its trout and ground hogs, its fox holes and sap boilings.
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