[Illustration: “It's _my_ cloth! I spun it, I wove it, every thread! It's all we've got for our clothes this winter!”] Her prayer was like a signal for its denial. One of the Hounds pushed her away and caught the cloth up. “We won't hurt it, Sister Bladen. We just want to see what a seamless garment looks like, anyway. Maybe it'll fit some of us. Here, boys, take a hold!” He held by the outer edge of the cloth, and flung the bolt unfurling itself toward his fellows over the heads of the believing men who had crowded forward to save it from the desecration, while the woman tried to seize it from him, beseeching, imploring, “Oh, don't hurt it, Bill Murray! Oh, be careful! Don't let it drop! Oh, don't, don't, don't!” “We can't do it any hurt, Sister Bladen, if it's got a miracle inside of it,” one of the ruffians mocked. “_You_ tell her we wont hurt it, Jim Redfield! She'll trust _you!_” The women believers were sobbing; the men gathered themselves for a struggle with the surprise sprung upon them, but held back as if in a superstitious hope of help from the god whom the women seemed not to trust in his failure of them. “Here, you fellows!” Redfield shouted over the tossing heads before him. “What do you want to spoil her cloth for?” His look and voice had their effect with the angry, pushing, shuffling, elbowing, wailing, weeping crowd, in a pause like the arrest of curiosity. “Let go that cloth, Bill,” he said, not with authority, but in a tone of good fellowship. The miller interposed with his friendly voice, and it seemed as if the unbelievers would give way in pity of the poor woman who had brought the cloth. Suddenly the bolt of stuff which Murray had conditionally yielded was twitched from Redfield in boisterous fun, and then in the frenzy more of mischief than malice it was seized by the Hounds, and torn into shreds. “Find the seamless raiment!” they yelled to one another. The unbelievers stood aside; the believers did nothing, in a palsy of amaze; the poor woman, to whom her toil and pride in it had hallowed the stuff, sank down staying herself on her hands from the floor, in hapless despair. Her moaning and sobbing filled the place after the tumult of destruction had been stricken silent. “Oh, I don't care for the miracle,” she kept lamenting, “but what are my children going to wear this winter? Oh, what will _he_ say to me!” It was her husband she meant. XIII