the dream, felt the brown
bureau, felt it hungrily, almost incredulously. The brown bureau had been
pushed against the door when they had come, and knocked and knocked. Then
they had thundered with the butts of their six-shooters, and the children
had wakened, and she had called out to them:

"Sh-sh! It's only a bad dream. Mammy will give you some dough to bake
to-morrow."

And she had gone to press her face flat to the thin wall, and call, "For
God's sake, don't wake the children!"

And they had called out, "Let him come out quiet, then."

And then she could feel that they put their shoulders to the door--the
weather-beaten door--with its crazy lock that didn't half catch. The brown
bureau had spun across the floor like a top, and they had crowded in. Then
she had done something to quiet the children--it was queer that she could
not remember what it was, when everything else in the dream still lived
within her, horribly distinct and real.

What a fool she was, with Jim asleep in the next room; she would not think
about it another minute. She began to dress, but her fingers were heavy,
and the vague oppression of nightmare blocked her efficiency. Repeatedly
she would detect herself subconsciously brooding over some one of the
links in that pitiless memory--what they had said to Jim; his undaunted
replies; how she had left him and gone into the next room because Jim had
told her to.

She called the children, but the sight of them, happy and flushed with
sleep, did not reassure her.

"Mammy," said Topeka, eldest of the family, and lately on the invalid
list, the victim of a cactus thorn, "my toe's all well; can I go
barefoot?"

"Topeka Rodney, what kind of feet do you expect to have when you are a
young lady, if you run barefoot now?"

Topeka, sitting on the side of the bed, with tousled hair, put her small
feet together and contemplated them. The toe was still suspiciously
inflamed for perfect convalescence, although Topeka, with a Spartan
courage that won her a place in the annals of household valor, had the day
before allowed her mother to pick out with a needle the torturing cactus
thorn, scorning to shed a tear during the operation, though afterwards she
had taken the piece of dried apple that was offered her and devoured it to
the last bite, as only just compensation for her sufferings.

"Dimmy dot a tore toe, too." But Jimmy showed a strange reticence about
offering proofs of his affliction. At the peri