Free The World Ends In Hickory Hollow by Ardath Mayhar

We waited for a minute, then we got out of the Plymouth and walked toward the gate, very slowly.
    I could feel eyes on me. Nobody was in sight, but there was the feel of vigilance all around us, and we stopped at the gate and waited. In a bit, there was a stir of motion in the garden beyond the fence. A dark face peered from behind a row of plum trees, then a tall black man stepped forward and spoke.
    "Where the Sweetbriers?" he asked in a slow, still voice. "That's their car, where are they?"
    Zack moved very cautiously "Nellie is at our house," he said. "Jess is–dead. Are you Bill?"
    "Dead? Really dead?" The man's eyes widened, and his color was suddenly grayish. "How?"
    "The Ungers ," Zack answered simply. "They all but killed Nellie, too. If we hadn't come down the river, looking for neighbors, she'd have died that night, I think, from the cold and loss of blood."
    "Come in the house," Fancher whispered, opening the gate. "We thought they were just after us because we're black. You mean they killed Jess Sweetbrier, a sweet old man like him?"
    "Beat him to death," I said, as I entered the kitchen of the big gray house. I found myself facing a tail young woman who held a shotgun pointed at my midriff.
    "They're all right, Annie," her husband called from behind us. She slowly lowered the gun barrel, but her expression was watchful. I could see no trace of the many children that Nellie had mentioned, but I felt that the older of them were probably in strategic locations, most likely with weapons. These people had learned caution in a tough school.
    It took a while to fill them in on the state of things along the river. They had their few head of cattle penned between their barn and the road, fearing panthers more than any unlikely wanderer, so they had no need to go down to the water except in summer. No well-worn trail marked a way up to their house from the wild woods along the river. So it was that the Ungers had come at them along the road, to which they had likely made their way from the Sweetbriers'. It had never occurred to the Fanchers that the river was the direction from which they made their destructive way.
    That made us uneasy.. If the road had led them to the Fanchers , it would lead them to the Jessups , possibly the Greens, and inevitably to Sim Jackman . Though the Fanchers had been armed and on guard, it was unlikely that the others might be.
    "I'm goin ' with you," Bill told us, when we rose to pursue our investigations. "These folks along here have been right with us. They stood by us when we talked to the Law about Claude Barron's threats and stunts. They came by now and again to see how we were. We're not real close, 'cause say what you will, we're black and they're white, but we've been good neighbors, just the same. If they're in trouble, I'm goin ' to be there to help ' em out."
    Annie nodded, her smoky eyes still and reserved. "We're okay, the kids and I. We all know what we're doing. You just be careful, Old Son. " The note in her voice said many things that her closed face hid..
    As we made our way from the garden, Bill raised his hand. A thin boy appeared from behind a shed, leaned his shotgun against the building, and approached us.
    "Tony, you take care of your mom and the young ones, you hear?" his father told him. The boy, not more than eleven, if that, was serious but not at all nervous. He nodded, quietly, then gave me a shy grin as he turned to resume whatever chore his father had interrupted.
    The mile to the Jessups ' cattle guard went quickly, for along this stretch the road lay between cleared fields, and no timber was down. The chinquapin trees curved gracefully over the drive, backed by thickets of huckleberry and haw, and we went down the road looking at every turn to see the house appear, but it was a good quarter of a mile before that happened.
    It was a sprawling structure of fieldstone that rose from its ridge with the authority of something that belonged just there and noplace