Before he could even hazard a guess as to the tortured source of the sound, the elongated and fully engaged figure of Winnifred Hatch emerged from between the barn and the chicken coop. In the vise of her left hand, the silenced but thrashing body of a bulb-eyed, dusty-feathered capon struggled futilely against the inevitable. In her right hand, she clutched a hatchet. The miller’s daughter—garbed in sweater and skirt and an intimidating leather butcher’s apron—marched to a stump near Marc, one that had been set firmly in the ground for her purpose. She plopped the lolling head of the doomed creature upon it and brought the hatchet blade down with the zeal of a Vandal. Blood burst everywhere. Marc leapt back, then stared down at the crimson spatter on his boots and the gaudy petit point etched suddenly in the snow. As Winnifred jerked the decapitated fowl up by its feet to let the blood drip out, she noticed the spectator for the first time. “Around here we do our own killing,”
