The Able Mclaughlins by Margaret Wilson — Read

The night after the second day's search Libby Keith had gone to bed for a while, because she was unable longer to stand up. Again she had risen when the moon rose, and Isobel McLaughlin, hearing her in the kitchen, had risen to find her washing out a shallow tin milk pan. Libby had managed to make her purpose known. Her voice was altogether gone now, after so much calling to her Lammie, and she was starting out with the pan and the poker, so that when her Peter heard the noise she was making, he would know that help was near. With Isobel following her as best she might, she beat back and forth up and down the roads again till morning, when she fell exhausted near the McCreaths' at dawn, so that they had to hitch up and take her home. And lying in the wagon, she muttered and moaned. Isobel understood that sometimes she was simply saying her son's name. Sometimes she was trying to tell what a good lad he had always been. And sometimes she said, "Only forty yards from home"; sometimes, "A wee'an's bones! " But some of the neighbors gathering had heard her pan's din and praying, and the hunt was on again, before the sun was well up.

Later that morning Isobel McLaughlin sat telling Wully about that night, in the Keiths' kitchen, whispering, looking carefully towards the door of the room where Libby was supposed to be resting. She was sitting by the breakfast table. On the red cloth three cold half-drunk cups of tea told how negligible a thing food was in that household. Suddenly she said passionately: