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But they couldn't fool Allen, however believing he might seem.... The Kinemons were listening to such a recital by their eldest son now. They were gathered in a room of very general purpose.
Before Allen reached home he had to feed and bed his horses, and walk back the two miles over the mountain from Crabapple; and a full hour before the time for his brother's arrival, David was surprised to see the stage itself making its way over the precarious turf road that led up to the Kinemons' dwelling.
A cross-roads was occupied by three stores and the courthouse, a square red-brick edifice with a classic white portico and high lantern; and it was out from that, where the highway had degenerated into a sod-cut trail, that the future home of the Kinemons lay. It was a small somber frame dwelling, immediately on the road, with a rain-washed patch rising abruptly at the back.
Only himself, David, remained to uphold the pride of the Kinemons. He gazed covertly at his mother; she must not, certainly, be warned of his course; she was a woman, to be spared the responsibility borne by men. A feeling of her being under his protection, even advice, had grown within him since he had discovered the death in the stable shed.
What were left of the Kinemons were moving into a small house on the edge of Crabapple; Senator Galt had already secured another tenant for the care of his bottom acres and fat herds. The night swept into the room, fragrant and blue, powdered with stars; the sheep bells sounded in a faintly distant clashing; a whippoorwill beat its throat out against the piny dark.
It seemed to David a long way from the valley, from Allen broken in bed, to the next term of court September in Crabapple. The Kinemons could protect, revenge, their own. The doctor passed out, and David entered where his mother was bent above her elder son. Hunter Kinemon, with a blackened rag, was wiping the lock of an old but efficient repeating rifle. His motions were unhurried, careful. Mrs.
He was without definite plan or knowledge of what must occur; but he told himself that any decision of Hunter Kinemon's must not exclude him. There were four Hatburns; but two Kinemons were better; and he meant his father and himself, for he knew instinctively that Allen was badly hurt. Soon there would be no Hatburns at all. And then the law could do as it pleased.
The Kinemons had a mort of friends who would have gladly accompanied, assisted Hunter; but this, the boy told himself, was their own affair their own pride. From within came the sound of his mother, crying softly, and of Allen murmuring in his pain. David was appalled by the swift change that had fallen over them the breaking up of his entire world, the shifting of every hope and plan.
And only last night I said again: 'Thank God, David's a man in his heart, for all his pretty cheeks! I thought I could build on you, with me getting old and Allen never taking a mortal step. Priest would give you a place, and glad, in the store the Kinemons are mighty good people. I had it all fixed up like that, how we'd live here and pay regular.
"I'd thank you to drive the stage into Crabapple, Ed," he said; "and if you see the doctor coming over the mountain he's been rung up for ask him, please sir, will he hurry." He turned and walked abruptly away, followed by David. Allen lay under the gay quilt in the Kinemons' big bed. His stained clothes drooped from a chair where Mrs. Kinemon had flung them.
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