As every one of the little circle leaped to his feet, Aunt Cornelia's eyes sought her husband's face, and his hers. After that grinding, terrible cry, the stillness of the night was unstirred. Pap Overholt sprang to the hearth--where even in the midsummer months a log smoulders throughout the day, to be brightened into a cheery blaze mornings and evenings,--seized a brand, one or two of the others following his example, and ran through the doorway, across the little chip-yard, making for the low-browed log barn and the grain-room beside it. None who witnessed that scene ever forgot it. Each one told it afterward in his own way, declaring that not while he lived could the remembrance of it pass from his mind. Pap Overholt's tall figure leaped crouching through the low doorway, and next instant lifted the blazing brand high above his head; the others followed, doing the same. There by the grain-bin, with ashy countenance and shaking limbs, the sweat of anguish upon his forehead, his eyes roving dumbly around the circle of faces revealed by the flickering light of the brands--there with the dreadful wolf-trap (locked by its chain to a stanchion) hanging to his right arm, its fangs bitten through and through the flesh, stood Sammy. Pap Overholt's mind refused at first to understand. He had known (with that sort of moral assurance which makes a thing as real to us as the evidence of the senses themselves) that it was Buck Fuson who had been stealing his grain. He had set his trap to catch Buck Fuson; not instantly could the mere sight of his eyes convince him that the trapped thief was the petted, adored, perverse son, who had refused his father's bounty when it had seemed the little wife and babies must starve. When he did realize, the cry that burst from his heart brought tears to all the eyes looking upon him. Down went the tall, broad figure, down into the dust of the grain-room floor. And there Pap Overholt grovelled on his knees, his white head almost at the thief's feet, crying, crying that old cry of David's: “Oh, Sammy, my son! My son, Sammy! An' I wouldn't 'a' touched a hair o' his head. My God! have mercy on my soul, that would 'a' fed him my heart's blood--an' he wouldn't take bite nor sup from my hand. Oh, Sammy! what did you want to do this to yo' po' old pappy fer?” Elder Justice, quick and efficient at eighty years, had sprung to the lad's right arm, two of the younger men close after. Aunt Cornelia held her piece of blazing light-wood for them while they cut away the sleeve and made ready to bear apart the powerful jaws of the trap. The little Huldy had said never a word. Her small, white face was strained; but it did not bear the marks of shock and of horror that were written on every other countenance there. When they had grasped jaws and lever, and Elder Justice's kind voice murmured, “Mind now, Sammy. Hold firm, son; we air a-gwine to pull 'em back. Brace yo'se'f,” the boy's haggard eyes sought his mother's face.