shrill, agonized scream.

As every one of the little circle leaped to his feet, Aunt Cornelia's eyes
sought her husband's face, and his hers. After that grinding, terrible cry,
the stillness of the night was unstirred. Pap Overholt sprang to the
hearth--where even in the midsummer months a log smoulders throughout the
day, to be brightened into a cheery blaze mornings and evenings,--seized a
brand, one or two of the others following his example, and ran through the
doorway, across the little chip-yard, making for the low-browed log barn
and the grain-room beside it.

None who witnessed that scene ever forgot it. Each one told it afterward in
his own way, declaring that not while he lived could the remembrance of it
pass from his mind. Pap Overholt's tall figure leaped crouching through the
low doorway, and next instant lifted the blazing brand high above his head;
the others followed, doing the same. There by the grain-bin, with ashy
countenance and shaking limbs, the sweat of anguish upon his forehead, his
eyes roving dumbly around the circle of faces revealed by the flickering
light of the brands--there with the dreadful wolf-trap (locked by its chain
to a stanchion) hanging to his right arm, its fangs bitten through and
through the flesh, stood Sammy.

Pap Overholt's mind refused at first to understand. He had known (with that
sort of moral assurance which makes a thing as real to us as the evidence
of the senses themselves) that it was Buck Fuson who had been stealing his
grain. He had set his trap to catch Buck Fuson; not instantly could the
mere sight of his eyes convince him that the trapped thief was the petted,
adored, perverse son, who had refused his father's bounty when it had
seemed the little wife and babies must starve. When he did realize, the cry
that burst from his heart brought tears to all the eyes looking upon him.