Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/47

 lamentation—a short, sharp, half-smothered wail of anguish. He saw Mrs. Flannigan and another neighbor woman run in hastily; he saw a second woman rush out of the house, hood her bare head in the end of an apron the other end of which was still fastened about the waist, and run frantically up the road. That woman was George's mother. He could not understand it, but a whir of alarm went off in his breast.

A procession of men was coming toward him—a little, short procession of workingmen, with their dinner-pails in their unoccupied hands, and between them they were carrying something. His mother had reached them now and was stumbling along beside that something, wiping her eyes with the apron and exclaiming hysterically. But George Judson still sat upon the fence, frozen stiff, for he saw that the thing the men were carrying was his father. They bore him crudely—but tenderly—upon a door with scantlings thrust underneath, and with his own coat rolled up for a pillow under his head.

All at once George Judson found his legs again. He leaped from the fence and flew to meet the procession.

"Ma! Oh, Ma!" he cried. "Pa! Pa!"

But his mother did not answer. Nobody answered. The solemn-faced bearers marched steadily, but slowly, forward. Eventually, however, the arm of the distracted mother swept out