peasant, whose lean acres extended up the mountainside in the rear.
The man had been unwilling to leave the little field that was his all
and had remained, for to go away would have been to him like parting
with life. He could be seen within the low-ceiled room, sitting
stupidly on a bench, watching with dull, lack-luster eyes the passing
of the troops whose retreat would give his ripe grain over to be the
spoil of the enemy. Standing beside him was his wife, still a young
woman, holding in her arms a child, while another was hanging by her
skirts; all three were weeping bitterly. Suddenly the door was thrown
open with violence and in its enframement appeared the grandmother, a
very old woman, tall and lean of form, with bare, sinewy arms like
knotted cords that she raised above her head and shook with frantic
gestures. Her gray, scanty locks had escaped from her cap and were
floating about her skinny face, and such was her fury that the words
she shouted choked her utterance and came from her lips almost
unintelligible.

At first the soldiers had laughed. Wasn't she a beauty, the old crazy
hag! Then words reached their ears; the old woman was screaming:

"Scum! Robbers! Cowards! Cowards!"

With a voice that rose shriller and more piercing still she kept
lashing them with her tongue, expectorating insult on them, and
taunting them for dastards with the full force of her lungs. And the
laughter ceased, it seemed as if a cold wind had blown over the ranks.
The men hung their heads, looked any way save that.

"Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!"