Читать книгу Forgive Us Our Trespasses - Lloyd C. Douglas - Страница 20

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It was late afternoon. They had just returned from the service at Oak Grove Baptist Church, and its sequel in the Cemetery. The long row of hitching-racks had been quite inadequate. Barely a third of the people had been able to enter the church.

Martha had whispered to the undertaker, and he had laid one of the sprays on their mother's grave, hard-by. Jason Schrofe, observing that his flowers had been chosen for this tribute, tarried, after the others had moved away, and replaced it.

Susan and Greta were busying themselves in the kitchen, sympathetically assisted by neighbours whose voices, restrained but endeavouring to be cheerful, drifted up the stairs where Martha, having laid her borrowed bonnet and veil on Julia's primly made, white-counterpaned bed, was stooping over the cradle.

Old Ferd tiptoed into the room, and Martha glanced up.

"Look at them long fingers," she said. "Like her'n."

Ferd handed her a yellow envelope.

"One o' the Schrofe boys fetched this over from Cromwell."

Martha opened it, read it through, silently, her lips forming the words, and gave it back. Ferd stared hard at the message from Seattle.

COURAGE DARLING IT WILL NOT BE LONG NOW GOOD JOB ZANDY

He tossed the telegram on Julia's bed, and stumbled out of the room, whimpering like a punished child.