ll was plumb sure you was--"

"I know. Never mind about that," the younger said, with a shrug meant to
shake off the topic. "Where's Ma, and--and Hettie?"

"Your Ma?--your Ma? Why, she's down at the spring-house watchin' 'em try
a new-fangled churn, or--or was a few minutes ago. Why, Dick, we all
thought you was--was--"

"Oh, I know, but where is Hettie?"

"Hettie? Oh, my Lord! Why, Dick, boy, hain't you heard a thing?"

"I've heard a sight more 'n I want to hear or will again," Dick Wrinkle
said, with lowering brows and a voice which seemed to bury itself in a
mass of inner threats as to dire approaching events. "I've come to
propose a--a settlement, without blood if it can be arranged; if not, we
kin spill plenty of it in the up-to-date Western style. I've been away,
and was detained longer 'n I expected by circumstances over which I had
no control, and in my absence, I'm told, my household--an', by gosh, my
honor!--has been stained. I'm not out looking for trouble, but trouble
may throw itself in my way. I'm prepared to do an outraged man's part.
I've got a medium-sized gun in my hip-pocket and a young cannon in this
valise."

"Oh, Dick, Dick, we mustn't have blood spilt, for all we do!" Old
Jason's display of actual concern was the first ever wrung from him.
"Besides, the law--the law must be considered."

"Oh, I'm willing to consider the law," Dick said. "I'll do a lot o'
things if I'm not made any madder 'n I am right now. I'm glad to git
back, an' I don't want to be mad. I'll do as much toward keepin' peace
as any other man. There ain't anything so awfully unheard of in what
happened to me. Fellers has been off from home before, an' the whole
world wasn't plumb upset by it."

"But they didn't rise from the dead," old Jason submitted,
argumentatively. "How on earth did you manage to do it? I mean--"

The son's glance for the first time wavered. He looked toward the
towering mountain as if for moral sustenance. His lips mutely moved as
if he were conning a lesson he was learning by rote, and then, seeing
the question still in his father's blearing eyes, he began:

"I met with trouble, Pa--I reckon some would style it an accident. When
that big tornado struck the country out there and so many was blowed to
smithereens and never had even the pieces of 'em put together again--I
say, Pa, when all that happened I was struck in the back of the head by
a rock or a beam or a plank--I never knew exactly which--an