across the floor and now lay before the
wide mouth of the hearth in a choking spell. Shem Dugmore made no move
until the fit was over and the sufferer lay quiet.

"How did you git out, Anse?" were the first words he spoke.

The consumptive rolled his head weakly from side to side and swallowed
desperately. "Pardoned out--in writin'--yistiddy."

"You air in purty bad shape," said Shem.

"Yes,"--the words came very slowly--"my lungs give out on me--and my
eyes. But--but I got here."

"You come jist in time," said his cousin; "this time tomorrer and you
wouldn't a' never found me here. I'd 'a' been gone."

"Gone!--gone whar?"

"Well," said Shem slowly, "after you was sent away it seemed like them
Tranthams got the upper hand complete. All of our side whut ain't
dead--and that's powerful few--is moved off out of the mountings to
Winchester, down in the settlemints. I'm 'bout the last, and I'm
a-purposin' to slip out tomorrer night while the Tranthams is at their
Christmas rackets--they'd layway me too ef----"

"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,