Joe, stunned by the sudden tragedy, stood for a moment as he had stopped when he laid his hand on Isom's shoulder. Ollie, on the other side of the fallen man, leaned over and peered into his face.
In that moment a wild turmoil of hopes and fears leaped in her hot brain. Was it deliverance, freedom? Or was it only another complication of shame and disgrace? Was he dead, slain by his own hand in the baseness of his own heart? Or was he only hurt, to rise up again presently with revilings and accusations, to make the future more terrible than the past. Did this end it; did this come in answer to her prayers for a bolt to fall on him and wither him in his tracks?
Even in that turgid moment, when she turned these speculations, guilty hopes, wild fears, in her mind, Isom's eyelids quivered, dropped; and the sounding breath in his nostrils ceased.
Isom Chase lay dead upon the floor. In the crook of his elbow rested a little time-fingered canvas bag, one corner of which had broken open in his fall, out of which poured the golden gleanings of his hard and bitter years.
On the planks beneath his shoulder-blades, where his feet had come and gone for forty years, all leached and whitened by the strong lye of countless scrubbings at the hands of the old wife and the new, his blood ran down in a little stream. It gathered in a cupped and hollowed plank, and stood there in a little pool, glistening, black. His wife saw her white face reflected in it as she raised up from peering into his blank, dead eyes.
"Look at his blood!" said she, hoarsely whispering. "Look at it--look at it!"
"Isom! Isom!" called Joe softly, a long pause between his words, as if summoning a sleeper. He stooped over, touching Isom's shoulder.
There was a trickle of blood on Isom's beard, where the rifle ball had struck him in the throat; back of his head that vital stream was wasting, enlarging the pool in the hollowed plank near Ollie's foot.
Again, in a flash, that quick feeling of lightness, almost joyful liberty, lifted her. Isom was dead, dead! What she had prayed for had fallen. Cruel, hard-palmed Isom, who had gripped her tender throat, was dead there on the floor at her feet! Dead by his own act, in the anger of his loveless heart.