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 tious look toward the kitchen windows. Mrs. Ellison and Eudora were up, quietly as Tom had made ready and attempted to drive away without disturbing them.

"No, I'll pass it up," Tom replied.

Mrs. Ellison and Eudora came out as Tom was mounting to the high seat to wish him good luck and say goodby. They attempted a sprightliness which they did not feel, and which carried no deceit to the man on the load of bones. He drove away with their unvoiced anxiety tingeing the promise of a bright day with gloom, a foreboding of trouble ahead of him which his quick spirits could not allay.

All that morning Mrs. Ellison went around the house restlessly. She would go to a window and peer down the road, which could be seen to the point where it passed over the hill since Tom mowed the orchard and cut away the low-hanging limbs; then to the kitchen porch, where she would stand listening, her head turned as if she expected the sound of distant shots, her face furrowed by the concern that would not let her rest.

"I shouldn't have let him go," she said time and again as the bright morning passed.

Waco was busy with something in the barn; Eudora slipped into the men's quarters and came back big-eyed and white, to report that Tom had taken the rifle, the revolver he had captured in the raid, her father's pistol, and no telling what else that Waco had supplied.

"I knew it! I knew it!" Mrs. Ellison said fatefully. "I never should have allowed that boy to go."

"We couldn't have stopped him—nobody could," Eudora said, in the voice of utter futility.