The girl, waiting in the darkness, expected to hear the sudden crash and
uproar of a fight as soon as the three creeping men should reach the
barn. She reflected in an agony upon the swift disaster that would
befall any enterprise so desperate. She had an impulse to beg them to
come away. The grass rustled in silken movements as she sped toward the
barn.
When she arrived, however, she gazed about her bewildered. The men were
gone. She searched with her eyes, trying to detect some moving thing,
but she could see nothing.
Left alone again, she began to be afraid of the night. The great
stretches of darkness could hide crawling dangers. From sheer desire to
see a human, she was obliged to peep again at the knothole. The sentry
had apparently wearied of talking. Instead, he was reflecting. The
prisoner still sat on the feed box, moodily staring at the floor. The
girl felt in one way that she was looking at a ghastly group in wax. She
started when the old horse put down an echoing hoof. She wished the men
would speak; their silence re-enforced the strange aspect. They might
have been two dead men.
The girl felt impelled to look at the corner of the interior where were
the cow stalls. There was no light there save the appearance of peculiar
gray haze which marked the track of the dimming rays of the lantern. All
else was sombre shadow. At last she saw something move there. It might
have been as small as a rat, or it might have been a part of something
as large as a man. At any rate, it proclaimed that something in that
spot was alive. At one time she saw it plainly and at other times it
vanished, because her fixture of gaze caused her occasionally to greatly
tangle and blur those peculiar shadows and faint lights. At last,
however, she perceived a human head. It was monstrously dishevelled and
wild. It moved slowly forward until its glance could fall upon the
prisoner and then upon the sentry. The wandering rays caused the eyes to
glitter like silver. The girl's heart pounded so that she put her hand
over it.
The sentry and the prisoner remained immovably waxen, and over in the
gloom the head thrust from the floor watched them with its silver eyes.
Finally, the prisoner slipped from the feed box, and, raising his arms,
yawned at great length. "Oh, well," he remarked, "you boys will get a
good licking if you fool around here much longer. That's some
satisfaction, anyhow, even if you did bag me. You'll get a good
walloping." He reflected for a moment, and decided: "I'm sort of willing
to be captured if you fellows only get a d----d good licking for being
so smart."
The sentry looked up and smiled a superior smile. "Licking, hey? Nixey!"
He winked exasperatingly at the prisoner. "You fellows are not fast
enough, my boy. Why didn't you lick us at ----? and at ----? and at
----?" He named some of the great battles.
To this the captive officer blurted in angry astonishment, "Why, we
did!"
The sentry winked again in profound irony. "Yes--I know you did. Of
course. You whipped us, didn't you? Fine kind of whipping that was! Why,
we----"
He suddenly ceased, smitten mute by a sound that broke the stillness of
the night. It was the sharp crack of a distant shot that made wild
echoes among the hills. It was instantly followed by the hoarse cry of a
human voice, a far-away yell of warning, singing of surprise, peril,
fear of death. A moment later there was a distant, fierce spattering of
shots. The sentry and the prisoner stood facing each other, their lips
apart, listening.
The orchard at that instant awoke to sudden tumult. There were the thud
and scramble and scamper of feet, the mellow, swift clash of arms, men's
voices in question, oath, command, hurried and unhurried, resolute and
frantic. A horse sped along the road at a raging gallop. A loud voice
shouted, "What is it, Ferguson?" Another voice yelled something
incoherent. There was a sharp, discordant chorus of command. An
uproarious volley suddenly rang from the orchard. The prisoner in gray
moved from his intent, listening attitude. Instantly the eyes of the
sentry blazed, and he said with a new and terrible sternness, "Stand
where you are!"
The prisoner trembled in his excitement. Expressions of delight and
triumph bubbled to his lips. "A surprise, by Gawd! Now--now, you'll
see!"
The sentry stolidly swung his carbine to his shoulder. He sighted
carefully along the barrel until it pointed at the prisoner's head,
about at his nose. "Well, I've got you, anyhow. Remember that! Don't
move!"
The prisoner could not keep his arms from nervously gesturing. "I won't;
but----"
"And shut your mouth!"
The three comrades of the sentry flung themselves into view.
"Pete--devil of a row!--can you----"
"I've got him," said the sentry calmly and without moving. It was as if
the barrel of the carbine rested on piers of stone. The three comrades
turned and plunged into the darkness.
In the orchard it seemed as if two gigantic animals were engaged in a
mad, floundering encounter, snarling, howling in a whirling chaos of
noise and motion. In the barn the prisoner and his guard faced each
other in silence.
As for the girl at the knothole, the sky had fallen at the beginning of
this clamour. She would not have been astonished to see the stars
swinging from their abodes, and the vegetation, the barn, all blow away.
It was the end of everything, the grand universal murder. When two of
the three miraculous soldiers who formed the original feed-box corps
emerged in detail from the hole under the beam and slid away into the
darkness, she did no more than glance at them.
Suddenly she recollected the head with silver eyes. She started forward
and again applied her eyes to the knothole. Even with the din resounding
from the orchard, from up the road and down the road, from the heavens
and from the deep earth, the central fascination was this mystic head.
There, to her, was the dark god of the tragedy.
The prisoner in gray at this moment burst into a laugh that was no more
than a hysterical gurgle. "Well, you can't hold that gun out forever!
Pretty soon you'll have to lower it."
The sentry's voice sounded slightly muffled, for his cheek was pressed
against the weapon. "I won't be tired for some time yet."
The girl saw the head slowly rise, the eyes fixed upon the sentry's
face. A tall, black figure slunk across the cow stalls and vanished back
of old Santo's quarters. She knew what was to come to pass. She knew
this grim thing was upon a terrible mission, and that it would reappear
again at the head of the little passage between Santo's stall and the
wall, almost at the sentry's elbow; and yet when she saw a faint
indication as of a form crouching there, a scream from an utterly new
alarm almost escaped her.
The sentry's arms, after all, were not of granite. He moved restively.
At last he spoke in his even, unchanging tone: "Well, I guess you'll
have to climb into that feed box. Step back and lift the lid."
"Why, you don't mean----"
"Step back!"
The girl felt a cry of warning arising to her lips as she gazed at this
sentry. She noted every detail of his facial expression. She saw,
moreover, his mass of brown hair bunching disgracefully about his ears,
his clear eyes lit now with a hard, cold light, his forehead puckered in
a mighty scowl, the ring upon the third finger of the left hand. "Oh,
they won't kill him! Surely they won't kill him!" The noise of the fight
in the orchard was the loud music, the thunder and lightning, the
rioting of the tempest which people love during the critical scene of a
tragedy.
When the prisoner moved back in reluctant obedience, he faced for an
instant the entrance of the little passage, and what he saw there must
have been written swiftly, graphically in his eyes. And the sentry read
it and knew then that he was upon the threshold of his death. In a
fraction of time, certain information went from the grim thing in the
passage to the prisoner, and from the prisoner to the sentry. But at
that instant the black formidable figure arose, towered, and made its
leap. A new shadow flashed across the floor when the blow was struck.
As for the girl at the knothole, when she returned to sense she found
herself standing with clinched hands and screaming with her might.
As if her reason had again departed from her, she ran around the barn,
in at the door, and flung herself sobbing beside the body of the soldier
in blue.
The uproar of the fight became at last coherent, inasmuch as one party
was giving shouts of supreme exultation. The firing no longer sounded in
crashes; it was now expressed in spiteful crackles, the last words of
the combat, spoken with feminine vindictiveness.
Presently there was a thud of flying feet. A grimy panting, red-faced
mob of troopers in blue plunged into the barn, became instantly frozen
to attitudes of amazement and rage, and then roared in one great chorus,
"He's gone!"
The girl who knelt beside the body upon the floor turned toward them her
lamenting eyes and cried: "He's not dead, is he? He can't be dead?"
They thronged forward. The sharp lieutenant who had been so particular
about the feed box knelt by the side of the girl and laid his head
against the chest of the prostrate soldier. "Why, no," he said, rising
and looking at the man. "He's all right. Some of you boys throw some
water on him."
"Are you sure?" demanded the girl, feverishly.
"Of course! He'll be better after awhile."
"Oh!" said she softly, and then looked down at the sentry. She started
to arise, and the lieutenant reached down and hoisted rather awkwardly
at her arm.
"Don't you worry about him. He's all right."
She turned her face with its curving lips and shining eyes once more
toward the unconscious soldier upon the floor. The troopers made a lane
to the door, the lieutenant bowed, the girl vanished.
"Queer," said a young officer. "Girl very clearly worst kind of rebel,
and yet she falls to weeping and wailing like mad over one of her
enemies. Be around in the morning with all sorts of doctoring--you see
if she ain't. Queer."
The sharp lieutenant shrugged his shoulders. After reflection he
shrugged his shoulders again. He said: "War changes many things; but it
doesn't change everything, thank God!"