Free The World Ends In Hickory Hollow by Ardath Mayhar Page A

else. I knew without asking that the Jessups had built it themselves ... probably grubbing the stone out of their own high-ground fields. There was smoke rising from the chimney.
    The last part of the drive lay over an embankment. It was obvious that the wet fall had put the river up well into the low ground that it spanned, for there were wet patches still shining with water, and swirled debris patterned the slope of the ridge.
    As we came into the open, we honked the horn, feeling that in this new world it was the fair–and safe–thing to do. Warning strangers of your approach was getting to be an ingrained habit. It was just as well that we did. A shot was fired across our bows as we crawled up the slope onto the embankment.
    We stopped promptly and opened the doors. Zack and Bill got out, and I scooted across and stood beside them. We held our hands away from our sides, so they could see that we weren't holding weapons.
    "Is that Bill Fancher ?" came a booming voice from the shelter of a hedge.
    "Sure is, Mr. Jessup," Bill answered. "These here is the Hardemans from upriver. They've come all the way round by the road to see if the folks along here are all right. The Ungers got Jess Sweetbrier a couple of days ago. If the Hardemans hadn't come down the river checking on livestock, Nellie'd have died, too."
    There was a short silence. I had the feeling that a conference was going on, and evidently I was correct, for a woman's voice called, "Come on over–on foot. We don't want to seem inhospitable, but you know we've got to be careful."
    "No problem," Bill called, and we went, single file, across the driveway and up the rise to the house.
    Carrie Jessup was sixtyish, small and strong-looking, with wrinkles at the corners of her eyes that would have been deep with laughter in normal circumstances. Her husband, Horace, was tall and slender, with the innocently wondering eyes of a professor of philosophy or medieval literature. His hand, when I shook it, was another matter. Calloused to the point of horniess , it could have crushed my bones without effort.
    Before we could speak, he said, in that incongruously booming voice, now damped to a rumble, "It's good of you to trouble yourselves about us. We've had problems, I'Il admit. And poor Sim Jackman from down the road–he's all but dead. Crawled up here through the woods and fields, after those devil women got through with him ... and his winter's cache of liquor. If he lives, it's not impossible that he'll be a teetotaler."
    As he spoke, I turned my eyes to Mrs. Jessup, and I saw a slow tear creep from behind her glasses. She said nothing, but she turned away as if to look back the way we had come.
    "Is that all the trouble you've had?" I asked him.
    "No," he said, and his head tilted forward as if the weight of the words to come were too much for his thin neck. "No. They came at us ... when was it, Mama? Three or four nights ago. They shot Grace ... " His voice wavered away into a basso groan.
    "Our oldest girl. She got here just after the blowup. Was on her way the night before it happened and was well away from Houston. She'd flunked out of school. Thank God. Laura was already here for the same reason. Thank the Lord we raised dumb kids. Our boy–we don't know. Anyway, the Ungers sent a little girl up the trail from the river. She was crying and taking on, all ragged and scratched and thin as a starved cat. There's no way we could have kept that child locked out. No way."
    She fell silent, and Horace took up the tale. "We got her inside and gave her some warm milk, washed her up some, and were trying to find out who she was and what had happened to her when she pulled a big old hogleg pistol out of the little bundle she had with her – not more than nine! – and told me to open the door. I started for her. No infant is going to give me orders, gun or no. She'd have killed me, but Grace tackled her from the side and got hit instead. She's in the house, now,