When Samson reached the mill it was ten o'clock. The men were soberer
than they had been in the afternoon. McCager had seen to that. The boy
replaced his exhausted mule with a borrowed mount. At midnight, as he
drew near the cabin of the Widow Miller, he gave a long, low
whippoorwill call, and promptly, from the shadow of the stile, a small
tired figure rose up to greet him. For hours that little figure had
been sitting there, silent, wide-eyed and terrified, nursing her knees
in locked fingers that pressed tightly into the flesh. She had not
spoken. She had hardly moved. She had only gazed out, keeping the vigil
with a white face that was beginning to wear the drawn, heart-eating
anxiety of the mountain woman; the woman whose code demands that she
stand loyally to her clan's hatreds; the woman who has none of the
man's excitement in stalking human game, which is also stalking him;
the woman who must only stay at home and imagine a thousand terrors
--and wait.
A rooster was crowing, and the moon had set. Only the stars were left.
"Sally," the boy reproved, "hit's most mornin', an' ye must be plumb
fagged out. Why hain't you in bed?"
"I 'lowed ye'd come by hyar," she told him simply, "and I waited fer
ye. I knowed whar ye had went," she added, "an' I was skeered."
"How did ye know?"
"I heered thet Tam'rack was in the jail-house, an' somebody hed ter go
ter Hixon. So, of course, I knowed hit would be you."