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Updated: May 15, 2025
Set a spell and I'll dish you some," she urged. The men looked at each other in some uncertainty. After a moment Munn said, "All right, if it ain't too much bother, Mrs. Brenner." "Not a bit," she cried eagerly. She bustled about, searching her meager stock of chinaware for uncracked bowls. "Set down?" suggested Mart. Munn sat down with a sigh, and his companions followed his example.
But the tragic voice went on intoning stubbornly, "Blood on his hands! Red! Dripping! I see blood!" Mrs. Brenner shuddered. "Seems like you could shut up a spell!" she complained. The old woman's voice trailed into a broken and fitful whispering. Olga's commands were the only laws she knew, and she obeyed them. Mrs. Brenner went back to the stove.
Up and up climbed the train, through the little white villages in the valley nooks, banked with whiter snow; through the narrow gorges, sometimes hanging over them, under steep granite walls seared with ice-filled cracks, their brows hung with icicles. Truro Pass is not so high as the Brenner, but it has a grand, wild look in winter, remote as it is from the haunts of men.
A group of men stood on the step, the faint light of the room picking out face after face that she recognized Sheriff Munn; Jim Barker, who kept the grocery in the village; Cottrell Hampstead, who lived in the next house below them; young Dick Roamer, Munn's deputy; and several strangers. "Well?" she asked ungraciously. "We want to see Brenner!" one of them said. She stepped back.
Not a light from the village below pierced the mist, and the lonely army of tall cedars on the black hill back of the house was hidden completely. "Who's there?" Mrs. Brenner hailed. But her voice fell flat and muffled. Far off on the beach she could dimly hear the long wail of a fog-horn. The faint throb of hope stilled in her breast.
"Uh-huh!" said Munn, following the gesture with his quiet eyes. He puffed several times before he spoke again. "What time did you come in, Brenner, from the beach?" Mrs. Brenner closed her hands tightly, the interlaced ringers locking themselves. "Oh, about forty minutes ago, I guess it was. Wasn't it, Olga?" Mart said carelessly. "Yes." Her voice was a breath. "Was your boy out to-day?"
The highest point which the road crossed is about 4600 feet above the sea, or a little higher than the Brenner Pass in the Tyrol. But there grain grows and orchards bear fruit, while here, under the parallel of 62°, nearly all vegetation ceases, and even the omnivorous northern sheep can find no pasturage.
If you are of my opinion, gather about you as many brave sharpshooters as you can, call out the Landsturm where it is possible, tell the other commanders to do the same, and advance, if possible, at once toward the Brenner, where I hope you will meet me or hear further news from me.
There was something touching in her frightened old face. "A man a stranger was killed up on the hill," Munn told her. "What's that got to do with us?" she countered. "Not a thing, Mrs. Brenner, probably, but I've just to make sure where every man in the village was this afternoon." Mrs. Brenner's lids flickered.
When Italy puts forward the argument that she must hold everything up to the Brenner because of her fear of invasion by the puny and bankrupt little state which is all that is left of the Austrian Empire, she is but weakening her case.
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