She cursed them with a blasting prediction that they would never forget this night, that they would remember it in dying, and she called out their names. But they went quickly. The lashes that had fallen upon her were the last, for while she was speaking they leaped to their horses and rode away in a hard gallop. She did not wait for their going nor give them one moment of watching as they leaped down the lane, but she turned to Jasper, who lay still on the ground, as one dead or deeply swooned. She unbound the rope that held fast his arms and roused him a little and lifted him to his feet so that he walked or was dragged to the house, leaning upon her and not knowing what he did. Inside the house he fell to the floor before the fireplace and she turned quickly back to the door, which she fastened securely with a chair, wedging the chair tightly under the rail, for the mob had broken the latch. Then she hung a comforter over the window, working swiftly in an agony of fear and caution and pride in her own. When she had secured the door from attack and the window from prying eyes she turned to Jasper, who lay filthy with mud and blood, lying across the floor before the fireplace. It seemed to her that this was her own matter, hers and Jasper’s, and that she would not call Hen or Nannie. She would not want them to see Jasper lying naked and bleeding in a welter of mud. It was her own matter. She kindled the fire quickly and brought water to heat and a basin and cloths. Then she bathed Jasper’s wounds, weeping over them, and she washed all the mud from his body and put warm clothing upon him, rubbing his feet to warm them, and after a while he came to consciousness and turned to his side with a great shuddering sob of humiliation.

On the next day rain fell without ceasing, and if anyone came to the lane Ellen did not know of it. Jasper sat all day before the fire in the darkened room. ‘Pap must be sick,’ Joe said. The boys worked all day in the barn, mending the harness, embarrassed by the subdued house, or if they entered they walked on tiptoe. Once Nannie stood beside Jasper’s chair, her arm across his shoulder, and they whispered a little together. Often he slept in his chair as one broken with weariness. Toward nightfall the rain ceased and the air grew crisp for a frost.

Ellen prepared supper early, the children having gathered to the kitchen. From some look of trouble in his face she knew that Hen had learned of what had happened. All day she had seen the distant houses, cabins like their own, as they stood remotely set in the mist of the rain and in their menacing withdrawals, as if a great circle had been drawn about their cabin to exclude it from the countryside.