caught him by the shoulder and tried to drag him back.

"Look out--the hammer!" he cried.

But quicker than the strength of Joe's young arm, quicker than old
Isom's wrath, was the fire in that corroded cap; quicker than the old
man's hand, the powder in the nipple of the ancient gun.

Isom fell at the report, his left hand still clutching the secret thing
to his bosom, his right clinging to the rifle-barrel. He lay on his back
where he had crashed down, as straight as if stretched to a line. His
staring eyes rolled, all white; his mouth stood open, as if in an
unuttered cry.

CHAPTER VII

DELIVERANCE

Joe, stunned by the sudden tragedy, stood for a moment as he had stopped
when he laid his hand on Isom's shoulder. Ollie, on the other side of
the fallen man, leaned over and peered into his face.

In that moment a wild turmoil of hopes and fears leaped in her hot
brain. Was it deliverance, freedom? Or was it only another complication
of shame and disgrace? Was he dead, slain by his own hand in the
baseness of his own heart? Or was he only hurt, to rise up again
presently with revilings and accusations, to make the future more
terrible than the past. Did this end it; did this come in answer to her
prayers for a bolt to fall on him and wither him in his tracks?

Even in that turgid moment, when she turned these speculations, guilty
hopes, wild fears, in her mind, Isom's eyelids quivered, dropped; and
the sounding breath in his nostrils ceased.

Isom Chase lay dead upon the floor. In the crook of his elbow rested a
little time-fingered canvas bag, one corner of which had broken open in
his fall, out of which poured the golden gleanings of his hard and
bitter years.

On the planks beneath his shoulder-blades, where his feet had come and
gone for forty years, all leached and whitened by the strong lye of
countless scrubbings at the hands of the old wife and the new, his blood
ran down in a little stream. It gathered in a cupped and hollowed plank,
and stood there in a little pool, glistening, black. His wife saw her
white face reflected in it as she raised up from peering into his blank,
dead eyes.

"Look at his blood!" said she, hoarsely whispering. "Look at it--look at
it!"

"Isom! Isom!" called Joe softly, a long pause between his words, as if
summoning a sleeper. He stooped over, touching Isom's shoulder.

There was a trickle of blood on Isom's beard, where the rifle ball had
struck him in the thr