d
luck!"

"They deserve it; I hope every herd in the State dies of scab."

"There wasn't a scabby sheep in our bunch. What a sight they were, loaded
with tallow! There wasn't one of them that couldn't have weathered a
blizzard; they could have lived on their own tallow for a month."

She tried to divert his attention from his lost flock. When he began to
talk about them the despair of his loss drove him to drink. She was ground
between the millstones of his going or staying. If he stayed they would
come for him; if he went, they would apprehend him before he was ten miles
from the house.

"Jim, we got to think. If there's a chance in a thousand that you can get
away, you got to take it; if there ain't, the children mustn't know. We
got to think it out!"

"There ain't a chance in a thousand, old girl. There ain't one in a
million. They're circling round in the hills out here now, waitin' for me,
like buzzards waitin' for the eyes of a dyin' horse."

She rocked herself, and the clutching fingers left white marks on her
face, but the eyes that met his glittered tearless:

"Then there ain't nothing left but to face it like a man?"

"That's all there be." He might have been giving an opinion on a matter in
which he had no interest.

"Then there ain't no use in our having any more talk about it?"

"'Tain't just what you'd call an agreeable subject," he answered, with the
sinister humor of the frontiersman who has learned to make a crony of
death.

She was tempted to kiss him--they were not given to demonstrations, this
pair--then decided it were kinder to him, less suggestive of what they
anticipated, not to deviate from their undemonstrative marital routine.

"Do you want your breakfast now?"

"I guess you might bring it along."

And for the same reason that she refrained from kissing him, she repressed
a desire to wring the neck of a young broiler and cook it for his
breakfast, remembering that she had heard they gave folks pretty much what
they wanted when they wouldn't want it long. So Jim got his usual
breakfast of bacon, uncooked canned tomatoes, soda-biscuit, and coffee.
She sat with him while he ate, but they spoke no more of "them" or of how
soon "they" might be expected. She told him that young Jim had pretended
that morning that he had a cactus thorn in his foot, so that he might have
a piece of dried apple. And old Jim, in an excess of parental fondness and
pride, said: "The damned little liar, he