The World Ends In Hickory Hollow by Ardath Mayhar Read Free Book Online Page B

moan. That released us from our shock, and Lucas moved quickly into the next room through the swinging door at his right. A very old woman lay propped against a leg of the dining table. She had pulled the bright cotton tablecloth down and covered herself with it against the cold, but she was almost blue with chill, as well as with loss of blood.
    Her short white hair was matted with dark clotting across the left side of her head, and the stroke that had split her scalp had closed her left eye with a purple swelling the size of a tennis ball. She had just enough consciousness left to know that someone had come and to let us know that she was there.
    "See ... to ... Jess," she whispered as Lantana lifted her against her shoulder, comforting her as if she were a child.
    Lucas took a knife from the kitchen, and I checked the load in my pistol. Then we moved into the living room, which adjoined the dining room. There was nobody there, so we went across it, down a short hall, and into a bedroom.
    Jess was there. He had been beaten to death with his own walking cane.
    The room was smeared and spattered with blood from wall to wall. Even the ceiling had dark brown drops across it in an arc, where the fouled cane had been swung high and down, scattering blood in its wake.
    Lucas knelt beside the dead man and felt his cheek, flexed one of the hands. The gaunt old fellow was as calm as any doctor could have been as he rose and said, "He's been dead most two days. I've seen a lot of dead men, child. I was in the war. But she's been lyin ' out there in the cold and losing blood for entirely too long. We've got to get her warm, then take her home with us. Nobody can stay here, even if it might be safe to. Somebody mighty ornery is in those woods."
    "Now we know what the Londowns were so antsy about," I said. "They must have had a run-in with whoever did this ... or could there be two batches of madmen running up and down the river or the road?"
    "Unlikely," he said, turning back to the dining room. " Let's look on the bright side. Let's say there's only one crew of murderers loose around here."
    In the short time we had been gone, Lantana had swept the worst of the debris out the kitchen door, and Mom Allie had lit a fire in the cookstove , rescued a kettle from the battered utensils, and set it full of water from the rain barrel. The bottled gas burned blue under its copper bottom, and it looked unnatural to me after the four years I had spent using wood to cook with.
    We brought a mattress from the second bedroom, which had been disordered but not destroyed as the other had been. With the blankets Lucas found in the quilt box beneath the kitchen windows, we made Mrs. Sweetbrier comfortable on the floor near the heater. As the iron grew warm, her color improved, and I blessed the big woodpile that had enabled Lantana to get a fire going in the potbellied heater so quickly.
    A canister of tea had been heaved out the back door and lay, still tight-lidded, on the entry porch. We made tea in a fruit jar, strong and hot, and Lantana found enough sugar spilled on the counter to make it very sweet. With this warming brew inside her the old lady revived quickly.
    One glance around her kitchen made her moan again, but she forgot the destruction when she looked up at me. "Jess?" she breathed.
    I've seldom felt so rotten. "He didn't make it," I told her. "He's in the bedroom. In a little, we'll bury him, if you'll tell us where he'd have liked to be put. You'll come home with us, and we'll take care of you, if you'll go."
    It wasn't soothing or comforting or even tactful, but at the moment it was all I could come up with. I kept thinking about our long ride back through the woods that would be getting dark in another two hours. I was in a hurry. She, more than anyone, could sense the reason for that.
    "Yes. Of course," she said quietly. "I knew, really, that he was dead, or he would have come looking for me. He'd like to be by the garden gate, under