e saw her sons push aside the matted
branches of the thicket and bury themselves in its labyrinth. A deep and
solemn pause succeeded. Then arose two loud and piercing cries, in
quick succession, which were followed by a quiet, still more awful and
appalling.

"Come back, come back, my children!" cried the woman, the feelings of a
mother getting the ascendency.

But her voice was hushed, and every faculty seemed frozen with horror,
as at that instant the bushes once more parted, and the two adventurers
re-appeared, pale, and nearly insensible themselves, and laid at her
feet the stiff and motionless body of the lost Asa, with the marks of a
violent death but too plainly stamped on every pallid lineament.

The dogs uttered a long and closing howl, and then breaking off
together, they disappeared on the forsaken trail of the deer. The flight
of birds wheeled upward into the heavens, filling the air with their
complaints at having been robbed of a victim which, frightful and
disgusting as it was, still bore too much of the impression of humanity
to become the prey of their obscene appetites.

CHAPTER XIII

A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade,
For,--and a shrouding sheet:
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet.
--Song in Hamlet.

"Stand back! stand off, the whole of ye!" said Esther hoarsely to the
crowd, which pressed too closely on the corpse; "I am his mother, and
my right is better than that of ye all! Who has done this? Tell me,
Ishmael, Abiram, Abner! open your mouths and your hearts, and let God's
truth and no other issue from them. Who has done this bloody deed?"

Her husband made no reply, but stood, leaning on his rifle, looking
sadly, but with an unaltered eye, at the mangled remains of his son. Not
so the mother, she threw herself on the earth, and receiving the cold
and ghastly head into her lap, she sat contemplating those muscular
features, on which the death-agony was still horridly impressed, in a
silence far more expressive than any language of lamentation could have
proved.

The voice of the woman was frozen in grief. In vain Ishmael attempted
a few words of rude consolation; she neither listened nor answered. Her
sons gathered about her in a circle, and expressed, after their uncouth
manner, their sympathy in her sorrow, as well as their sense of their
o