“Something has happened to Allen!” She pressed her hands against her laboring breast; David ran forward and met the surrey as it came through the fence opening by the stable shed. Ed Arbogast was driving; and a stranger--a drummer evidently--in a white-and-black check suit, was holding Allen, crumpled in a dreadful bloody faint. “Where's Hunter?” Arbogast asked the boy. “There he comes now,” David replied, his heart pounding wildly and dread constricting his throat. Hunter Kinemon and his wife reached the stage at the same moment. Both were plaster-white; but the woman was shaking with frightened concern, while her husband was deliberate and still. “Help me carry him in to our bed,” he addressed Ed Arbogast. They lifted Allen out and bore him toward the house, his limp fingers, David saw, trailing through the grass. At first the latter involuntarily turned away; but, objurgating such cowardice, he forced himself to gaze at Allen. He recognized at once that his brother had not been shot; his hip was too smeared and muddy for that. It was, he decided, an accident, as Arbogast and the drummer lead Hunter Kinemon aside. David Kinemon walked resolutely up to the little group. His father gestured for him to go away, but he ignored the elder's command. He must know what had happened to Allen. The stranger in the checked suit was speaking excitedly, waving trembling hands--a sharp contrast to the grim immobility of the Greenstream men: “He'd been talking about that family, driving out of Beaulings and saying how they had done this and that; and when we came to where they lived he pointed out the house. A couple of dark-favored men were working in a patch by the road, and he waved his whip at them, in a way of speaking; but they never made a sign. The horses were going slow then; and, for some reason or other, his little dog jumped to the road and ran in on the patch. Sirs, one of those men spit, stepped up to the dog, and kicked it into Kingdom Come.” David's hands clenched; and he drew in a sharp sobbing breath. “This Allen,” the other continued, “pulled in the team and drawed a gun from under the seat before I could move a hand. You can hear me--I wouldn't have kicked any dog of his for all the gold there is! He got down from the stage and started forward, and his face was black; then he stopped, undecided. He stood studying, with the two men watching him, one leaning careless on a grub hoe. Then, by heaven, he turned and rested the gun on the seat, and walked up to where laid the last of his dog. He picked it up, and says he: “'Hatburn, I got Government mail on that stage to get in under contract, and there's a passenger too--paid to Crabapple; but when I get them two things done I'm coming back to kill you two dead to hear the last trumpet.'