What had she done to keep them quiet?  There had been a thunderous knocking at the door.  She had expected it and was prepared; because the lock was feeble, she had shoved the old brown bureau against the door.

Nothing had happened.  What a fool she was to lie there and think of it!  There was the brown bureau against the wall; she could hear the deep breathing of Jim in the room beyond.  Jim had been unequal to the task of conventionally going to bed the night before, and she had put a pillow under his head and a quilt over him.  She was the last woman in the world to worry about Jim, drunk, or to nag him for it when sober.  But she didn’t like the children to see him that way.

What was it that she had done to quiet the children when “they” rode up?  She had done something and they had gone to sleep again, and she—­and she—­ oh no, it hadn’t happened.  What a fool she was to lie there thinking!  There were the children to rouse and dress, and breakfast to cook, and Jim—­Jim would be feeling pretty mean this morning; he’d like a good cup of coffee.  She was glad he was alive to make coffee for.

She got up and, in the uncertainty bred of the dream, felt the brown bureau, felt it hungrily, almost incredulously.  The brown bureau had been pushed against the door when they had come, and knocked and knocked.  Then they had thundered with the butts of their six-shooters, and the children had wakened, and she had called out to them: 

“Sh-sh!  It’s only a bad dream.  Mammy will give you some dough to bake to-morrow.”

And she had gone to press her face flat to the thin wall, and call, “For God’s sake, don’t wake the children!”

And they had called out, “Let him come out quiet, then.”

And then she could feel that they put their shoulders to the door—­the weather-beaten door—­with its crazy lock that didn’t half catch.  The brown bureau had spun across the floor like a top, and they had crowded in.  Then she had done something to quiet the children—­it was queer that she could not remember what it was, when everything else in the dream still lived within her, horribly distinct and real.

What a fool she was, with Jim asleep in the next room; she would not think about it another minute.  She began to dress, but her fingers were heavy, and the vague oppression of nightmare blocked her efficiency.  Repeatedly she would detect herself subconsciously brooding over some one of the links in that pitiless memory—­what they had said to Jim; his undaunted replies; how she had left him and gone into the next room because Jim had told her to.

She called the children, but the sight of them, happy and flushed with sleep, did not reassure her.

“Mammy,” said Topeka, eldest of the family, and lately on the invalid list, the victim of a cactus thorn, “my toe’s all well; can I go barefoot?”

“Topeka Rodney, what kind of feet do you expect to have when you are a young lady, if you run barefoot now?”