The beast had run past the slaughter-yard and come to the creekside, and four men were not able to drive her. She would go uncertainly forward a few feet or turn and run back, all the men after her with staves, or she broke through hedges and jumped fences, mad to get away. After two hours of struggle she was back by the creek again running in the school-yard. She was a well-marked creature, fattened for the slaughter, but alert and sinewy. She broke one of her horns on Bradley’s gate, but she did not consent to go where the men meant to take her, and she leaped the hedge again. Lee Cummings was after her, and Will Judson, and Lum Brown, the black man who worked with the Burns cattle, who always shot the beef with his shotgun. The heifer’s hair was all on end now and her eyes were wild, her side bleeding where she had scraped against some broken gate hinge, her feet cut and her left horn gone. The children at the school could scarcely attend to their books, knowing how the struggle went forward, although two or three of the boys wanted to join in the fight. “Would you expect her, though, to walk gentle up to the slaughter-pen and put her head inside the door?” Thad asked. He was standing at noon by the school-yard gate. “That’s how a man expects a critter he aims to butcher to act. Walk right up in front of the shotgun and stand straight.” The conflict ended at noon when the beast was entrapped in the slaughter-house, but Lum Brown would not go inside to shoot. Hearing the lessons during the afternoon, Theodosia knew the end of the struggle, and the children knew, and a mingled satisfaction and distress made them mindful of their books, abstracted and attentive to the printed sayings of their pages. Lum Brown had been obliged to push the barrel of the gun through a crack in the boarded wall and shoot the heifer from without. There was no answer to the question raised by the unwilling heifer. The answers in the books were easily found. * * * * * She had moved up the valley and spring was well at hand. She sat in Judson’s house on a cold green afternoon in late April. The stones of the hearth tilted away from the fireplace and sloped off to the floor, which gave unevenly toward the rear right corner of the room. A jar of cream had been set to sour beside the fender. The children were climbing over one another and over their mother’s feet, asking the words in their books. The mother with a baby in her arms was slowly rocking, was mending a garment, was giving the child her breast. Her hair was marked with gray as if a veil of light were spread under its darkness, and her great bosom was without flesh, was powerful with brawn and gland and bone. This would be her last child, and a quiet in her spent body said, “I am glad; I had enough.” The door to the front bedroom was opened and in the other room, that for the guest, a new fire burned coldly in the grate.