Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/320

316 match burnt itself out and dropped from her nerveless fingers.

Slowly the old woman retreated. She could not turn, could not run. She clasped the bottle of varnish remover tightly in her arms, feeling perhaps it had some potency to keep her from the terrible head that was pursuing her. Suddenly she backed into one of Philip's suits suspended on a coat hanger from a nail in a scantling.

"The hangman hisse'f!" she sobbed.

A piercing shriek resounded through the house, another and another—shrieks so loud and shrill, so blood-curdling, that Rolfe Bolling stirred uneasily in his heavy slumber and opened his eyes.

"Mam' Peachy!" he roared. "Where are you, Mam' Peachy? Help! Help!" he blubbered like a great baby and covered his head with the quilt.

Another shriek! Yet another! A sound of rushing and of a falling body, and then silence!