"

XIX

"Rocked By A Hempen String"

Alida heard the mingled sounds of footsteps and hoofs grow fainter on the
trail. The children looked at her to tell them why this night was
different from all others--what was happening. But she could only cower
among them, more terrified than they. She seemed to be shrunken from the
happenings of that day. They hardly knew the little, shrivelled, gray
woman who looked at them with unfamiliar eyes. Alida gazed at the little
Judith, and there was something in her mother's glance that made the
little one hide her face in her sister's shoulder. Young Judith it was who
all unwittingly had told the lynchers that her father was at home, and in
Alida's heart there was towards this child a blind, unreasoning hate.
Better had she never been born than live to do this thing!

It was the wee man, Jim, who first began to reflect resentfully on this
intrusion on his slumbers. He had been sleeping well and comfortably when
some grown-ups came with a lot of noise, and his father had gone away with
them. It had frightened him, but his mother was here, and why should she
not put him to sleep again?

"Muvvy, sing 'Dway Wolf.'" And as she paid no heed, but looked at him,
white-faced and strange, he again repeated, with his most insinuating and
beguiling tricks of eye and smile:

"Muvvy, sing 'Dway Wolf' for Dimmy."

The child put his head in his mother's lap, and Alida began, scarce
knowing what she did:

"'The gray wolves are coming fast over the hill,
Run fast, little lamb, do not baa, do not bleat,
For the gray wolves are hungry, they come here to kill,
And the lambs shall be scattered--'

"No, no, Jimmy, muvvy cannot sing. Oh, can't you feel, child? Judith,
Judith, why were you ever born?"

It was still in the valley. Had they come to the dead cotton-woods yet?
Had they begun it? The children shrank from this gray-faced woman whom
they did not know and but yet a little while had been their mother. An
awful silence had fallen on the night. The range-cattle no longer bellowed
in their thirst; the hot wind no longer blew from the desert. A hush not
of earth nor air nor the things that were of her ken seemed to have fallen
about them, muffing the dark loneliness as by invisible flakes. The
children had crouched close together for comfort. They feared the little,
gray-faced woman who seemed to have stolen into their mother's place and
looked at