In the excitement, now gave a tremendous throb that made her grit

her teeth and shift her weight to the heel. Tugging and straining,

perspiration dripping from her forehead, she dragged him down the

hall, a red stain following her path.

"If he bleeds across the yard, we can't hide it," she gasped.

"Give me your shimmy, Melanie, and I'll wad it around his head."

Melanie's white face went crimson.

"Don't be silly, I won't look at you," said Scarlett. "If I had on

a petticoat or pantalets I'd use them."

Crouching back against the wall, Melanie pulled the ragged linen

garment over her head and silently tossed it to Scarlett, shielding

herself as best she could with her arms.

"Thank God, I'm not that modest," thought Scarlett, feeling rather

than seeing Melanie's agony of embarrassment, as she wrapped the

ragged cloth about the shattered face.

By a series of limping jerks, she pulled the body down the hall

toward the back porch and, pausing to wipe her forehead with the

back of her hand, glanced back toward Melanie, sitting against the

wall hugging her thin knees to her bare breasts. How silly of

Melanie to be bothering about modesty at a time like this, Scarlett

thought irritably. It was just part of her nicey-nice way of

acting which had always made Scarlett despise her. Then shame rose

In her. After all--after all, Melanie had dragged herself from bed

so soon after having a baby and had come to her aid with a weapon

too heavy even for her to lift. That had taken courage, the kind

of courage Scarlett honestly knew she herself did not possess, the

thin-steel, spun-silk courage which had characterized Melanie on

the terrible night Atlanta fell and on the long trip home. It was

the same intangible, unspectacular courage that all the Wilkeses

possessed, a quality which Scarlett did not understand but to which

she gave grudging tribute.

"Go back to bed," she threw over her shoulder. "You'll be dead if

you don't. I'll clean up the mess after I've buried him."

"I'll do it with one of the rag rugs," whispered Melanie, looking

at the pool of blood with a sick face.

"Well, kill yourself then and see if I care! And if any of the

folks come back before I'm finished, keep them in the house and

tell them the horse just walked in from nowhere."

Melanie sat shivering in the morning sunlight and covered her ears

against the sickening series of thuds as the dead man's head bumped

down the porch steps.

No one questioned whence the horse had come. It was so obvious he

was a stray from the recent battle and they were well pleased to

have him. The Yankee lay in the shallow pit Scarlett had scraped

out under the scuppernong arbor. The uprights which held the thick

Vines were rotten and that night Scarlett hacked at them with the

kitchen knife until they fell and the tangled mass ran wild over

the grave. The replacing of these posts was one bit of repair work

Scarlett did not suggest and, if the negroes knew why, they kept

their silence.

No ghost rose from that shallow grave to haunt her in the long

nights when she lay awake, too tired to sleep. No feeling of

horror or remorse assailed her at the memory. She wondered why,

knowing that even a month before she could never have done the

deed. Pretty young Mrs. Hamilton, with her dimple and her jingling

earbobs and her helpless little ways, blowing a man's face to a

pulp and then burying him in a hastily scratched-out hole!

Scarlett grinned a little grimly thinking of the consternation such

an idea would bring to those who knew her.

"I won't think about it any more," she decided. "It's over and

done with and I'd have been a ninny not to kill him. I reckon--I

reckon I must have changed a little since coming home or else I

couldn't have done it."

She did not think of it consciously but in the back of her mind,

whenever she was confronted by an unpleasant and difficult task,

the idea lurked giving her strength: "I've done murder and so I

can surely do this."

She had changed more than she knew and the shell of hardness which

had begun to form about her heart when she lay in the slave garden

at Twelve Oaks was slowly thickening.

Now that she had a horse, Scarlett could find out for herself what

had happened to their neighbors. Since she came home she had

wondered despairingly a thousand times: "Are we the only folks

left in the County? Has everybody else been burned out? Have they

all refugeed to Macon?" With the memory of the ruins of Twelve

Oaks, the MacIntosh place and the Slattery shack fresh in her mind,

she almost dreaded to discover the truth. But it was better to

know the worst than to wonder. She decided to ride to the

Fontaines' first, not because they were the nearest neighbors but

because old Dr. Fontaine might be there. Melanie needed a doctor.

She was not recovering as she should and Scarlett was frightened by

her white weakness.

So on the first day when her foot had healed enough to stand a

slipper, she mounted the Yankee's horse. One foot in the shortened

stirrup and the other leg crooked about the pommel in an

approximation of a side saddle, she set out across the fields

toward Mimosa, steeling herself to find it burned.

To her surprise and pleasure, she saw the faded yellow-stucco house

standing amid the mimosa trees, looking as it had always looked.

Warm happiness, happiness that almost brought tears, flooded her

when the three Fontaine women came out of the house to welcome her

with kisses and cries of joy.

But when the first exclamations of affectionate greeting were over

and they all had trooped into the dining room to sit down, Scarlett

felt a chill. The Yankees had not reached Mimosa because it was

far off the main road. And so the Fontaines still had their stock

and their provisions, but Mimosa was held by the same strange

silence that hung over Tara, over the whole countryside. All the

slaves except four women house servants had run away, frightened by

the approach of the Yankees. There was not a man on the place

unless Sally's little boy, Joe, hardly out of diapers, could be

counted as a man. Alone in the big house were Grandma Fontaine, in

her seventies, her daughter-in-law who would always be known as

Young Miss, though she was in her fifties, and Sally, who had

barely turned twenty. They were far away from neighbors and

unprotected, but if they were afraid it did not show on their

faces. Probably, thought Scarlett, because Sally and Young Miss

were too afraid of the porcelain-frail but indomitable old Grandma

to dare voice any qualms. Scarlett herself was afraid of the old

lady, for she had sharp eyes and a sharper tongue and Scarlett had

felt them both in the past.

Though unrelated by blood and far apart in age, there was a kinship

of spirit and experience binding these women together. All three

wore home-dyed mourning, all were worn, sad, worried, all bitter

with a bitterness that did not sulk or complain but, nevertheless,

peered out from behind their smiles and their words of welcome.

For their slaves were gone, their money was worthless, Sally's

husband, Joe, had died at Gettysburg and Young Miss was also a

widow, for young Dr. Fontaine had died of dysentery at Vicksburg.

The other two boys, Alex and Tony, were somewhere in Virginia and

nobody knew whether they were alive or dead; and old Dr. Fontaine

was off somewhere with Wheeler's cavalry.

"And the old fool is seventy-three years old though he tries to act

younger and he's as full of rheumatism as a hog is of fleas," said

Grandma, proud of her husband, the light in her eyes belying her

sharp words.

"Have you all had any news of what's been happening in Atlanta?"

asked Scarlett when they were comfortably settled. "We're

completely buried at Tara."

"Law, child," said Old Miss, taking charge of the conversation, as

was her habit, "we're in the same fix as you are. We don't know a

thing except that Sherman finally got the town."

"So he did get it. What's he doing now? Where's the fighting

now?"

"And how would three lone women out here in the country know about

the war when we haven't seen a letter or a newspaper m weeks?" said

the old lady tartly. "One of our darkies talked to a darky who'd

seen a darky who'd been to Jonesboro, and except for that we

haven't heard anything. What they said was that the Yankees were

just squatting in Atlanta resting up their men and their horses,

but whether it's true or not you're as good a judge as I am. Not

that they wouldn't need a rest, after the fight we gave them."

"To think you've been at Tara all this time and we didn't know!"

Young Miss broke in. "Oh, how I blame myself for not riding over

to see! But there's been so much to do here with most all the

darkies gone that I just couldn't get away. But I should have made

time to go. It wasn't neighborly of me. But, of course, we

thought the Yankees had burned Tara like they did Twelve Oaks and

the MacIntosh house and that your folks had gone to Macon. And we

never dreamed you were home, Scarlett."

"Well, how were we to know different when Mr. O'Hara's darkies came

through here so scared they were popeyed and told us the Yankees

were going to burn Tara?" Grandma interrupted.

"And we could see--" Sally began.

"I'm telling this, please," said Old Miss shortly. "And they said

the Yankees were camped all over Tara and your folks were fixing to

go to Macon. And then that night we saw the glare of fire over

toward Tara and it lasted for hours and it scared our fool darkies

so bad they all ran off. What burned?"

"All our cotton--a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth," said

Scarlett bitterly.

"Be thankful it wasn't your house," said Grandma, leaning her chin

on her cane. "You can always grow more cotton and you can't grow a

house. By the bye, had you all started picking your cotton?"

"No," said Scarlett, "and now most of it is ruined. I don't

imagine there's more than three bales left standing, in the far

field in the creek bottom, and what earthly good will it do? All

our field hands are gone and there's nobody to pick it."

"Mercy me, all our field hands are gone and there's nobody to pick

it!" mimicked Grandma and bent a satiric glance on Scarlett.

"What's wrong with your own pretty paws, Miss, and those of your

sisters?"

"Me? Pick cotton?" cried Scarlett aghast, as if Grandma had been

suggesting some repulsive crime. "Like a field hand? Like white

trash? Like the Slattery women?"

"White trash, indeed! Well, isn't this generation soft and

ladylike! Let me tell you, Miss, when I was a girl my father lost

all his money and I wasn't above doing honest work with my hands

and in the fields too, till Pa got enough money to buy some more

darkies. I've hoed my row and I've picked my cotton and I can do

it again if I have to. And it looks like I'll have to. White

trash, indeed!"

"Oh, but Mama Fontaine," cried her daughter-in-law, casting

imploring glances at the two girls, urging them to help her smooth

the old lady's feathers. "That was so long ago, a different day

entirely, and times have changed."

"Times never change when there's a need for honest work to be

done," stated the sharp-eyed old lady, refusing to be soothed.

"And I'm ashamed for your mother, Scarlett, to hear you stand there

and talk as though honest work made white trash out of nice people.

'When Adam delved and Eve span'--"

To change the subject, Scarlett hastily questioned: "What about

the Tarletons and the Calverts? Were they burned out? Have they

refugeed to Macon?"

"The Yankees never got to the Tarletons. They're off the main

road, like we are, but they did get to the Calverts and they stole

all their stock and poultry and got all the darkies to run off with

them--" Sally began.

Grandma interrupted.

"Hah! They promised all the black wenches silk dresses and gold

earbobs--that's what they did. And Cathleen Calvert said some of

the troopers went off with the black fools behind them on their

saddles. Well, all they'll get will be yellow babies and I can't

say that Yankee blood will improve the stock."

"Oh, Mama Fontaine!"

"Don't pull such a shocked face, Jane. We're all married, aren't

we? And, God knows, we've seen mulatto babies before this."

"Why didn't they burn the Calverts' house?"

"The house was saved by the combined accents of the second Mrs.

Calvert and that Yankee overseer of hers, Hilton," said Old Miss,

who always referred to the ex-governess as the "second Mrs.

Calvert," although the first Mrs. Calvert had been dead twenty

years.

"'We are staunch Union sympathizers,'" mimicked the old lady,

twanging the words through her long thin nose. "Cathleen said the

two of them swore up hill and down dale that the whole passel of

Calverts were Yankees. And Mr. Calvert dead in the Wilderness!

And Raiford at Gettysburg and Cade in Virginia with the army!

Cathleen was so mortified she said she'd rather the house had been

burned. She said Cade would bust when he came home and heard about