reaked its complaint of
disrepair and the baby in her arms raised a shrill and peevish howl of
malnutrition.

As the mother clasped it closer and rocked it against her shrunken
breast a second and older woman appeared in the doorway, a witch-faced
slattern who inquired in a nasal whine:

"Kain't ye, no fashion, gentle him ter sleep, Sally?"

The mother shook her head despondently.

"My milk don't seem ter nourish him none," she answered, and the voice
which had once been sweet carried a haunting whine of tragedy.

Into the lawless tangle of the "laurel-hell" that came down the
mountainside to encroach upon the meagre patch reclaimed for human
habitation, a man who had crept yard by yard to the thicket's edge drew
back at the sight of the older woman.

This man carried a rifle which he hitched along with him as he made his
slow progress, and his clothes were ragged from laboured travel through
rocky tangles. Small stains of blood, dried brown on his face and hands,
testified to the stinging obstruction of thorned trailer and creeping
briar, and his cheeks were slightly hollowed because for two days he had
avoided human habitations where adequate food could be obtained.

Now he crouched there, gazing steadfastly at the house, and schooled his
patience to keep vigil until the mother should come out or the other
woman go away.

At least, Parish Thornton told himself, his sister and her baby were
alive.

Out of the house door slouched a year-old hound puppy with shambling
feet and lean ribs. It stood for a moment, whining and wagging a
disconsolate tail at the woman's feet, then came suddenly to life and
charged a razor-back hog that was rooting at will in what should have
been a potato patch.

The hog wheeled with a startled grunt and stampeded into the
thicket--almost upsetting in its headlong flight the man who was hiding
there.

But the dog had stopped and stood rigidly sniffing as human scent
proclaimed itself to his nostrils. The bristles rose erect as quills
along his neck and shoulders as a deep growl rumbled in his throat.

That engrossment of interest and disquiet held until the woman with the
baby in her arms came down the two steps, in curiosity, and crossed the
yard.

Then Thornton let his whisper go out to her with an utterness of
caution: "Don't say nothin', Sally.... Walk back inter ther woods ...
outen sight of the house ... it's me ... it's yore brother, Ken."

For an instant she stood as