| caption: |
Chapter fifteen. Village Justice. |
| caption: |
attempt to storm family house |
| text: |
He reached it only a little ahead of the hunt. (That was when they began to yell, when they found him there.) They raced back, shrieking, up the street, to where his mother and younger brother, the boy Ningchangba, had barricaded themselves in the inner room. They tried to smash in the door; they put two spears through the outside wall; and would almost certainly have broken in and killed Ningchangba had they not been stopped by the headmen and village elders, who intimated that the case was now in official hands. Nevertheless, they ranged the village for most of the morning, screaming for blood, stabbing the ground, and shaking their spears like a mob of lunatics; shrieking threats, and challenging Samrangba's family, till a village meeting drew off all but the quite insane. |
