The window through whose broken pane Glory had dispatched her
feathered messenger could not be seen into from the exterior. That was
a temporary handicap for the besiegers and one upon which, in all
their forethought, they had not calculated. It happened that at this
hour of the afternoon the slanting sun struck blindingly upon the
glass that still remained unbroken and confused the ambushed eyes that
raked the place from advantageous points along the upper slopes.
So when Glory had risen there for an instant, against the window
itself, the vigilant assassins had been able to make out only the
unidentified shadow of a figure moving there, and upon that figure, at
point-blank range, they had loosed their volley. Whose figure it was
they could not tell, and since they believed their intended victim to
be alone they did not question. In the confusion of the instant, with
the glare on windowpanes, they missed the spot of light that rose
phoenixlike as the pigeon took flight. The frightened bird mounted
skyward unnoted and flustered by the bellowing of so much gunnery.
But Spurrier's shout of horror was heard by the besiegers and
misinterpreted as a cry wrung from him under a mortal wound.
The assailants had not seen nor suspected Glory's approach because she
had come from the front, and had arrived before they, drawing in from
the rear and sides, had reached their stations commanding a complete
outlook. They had assumed their victim to be in solitary possession
and now they also assumed him to be helpless--perhaps already dead.
Yet they waited, following long-revered precepts of wariness,
before going onward across the open stretch of the dooryard for an
ultimate investigation. He might die slowly--and hard. He might
have left in him enough fight to take a vengeful toll of the oncoming
attackers--and they could afford to make haste slowly.
So they settled down in their several hiding places and remained as
inconspicuous as grass burrowing field mice. The forest cathedral
which they defiled seemed lifeless in the hushed stillness of the
afternoon as the sun rode down toward its setting.
John Spurrier, inside the house, living where he was supposed to be
dead, at first made no sound that carried out to them across the
little interval of space.
He was kneeling on the floor with the girl's head cradled on his knees
and in his throat sounded only smothering gasps of inarticulate
despair. These low utterances were animal-like and wrung him with the
agonies of heartbreak. He thought that she must have died just after
the whisper and the smile with which she had announced her success in
her effort to save him.
Kneeling there with the bright head inert on his corduroy-clad knee,
he fancied that the smile still lingered on her lips even after she
had laid down her life for him five minutes from the time he had
forsworn her.
Now that she was gone and he about to go, he could recognize her as a
serene and splendid star shining briefly above the lurid shoddiness of
his own grasping life--and the star had set.
At first a profoundly stunned and torpid feeling held him numb; a
blunt agony of loss and guilt, but slowly out of that wretched
paralysis emerged another thought. He was helpless to bring her back
and that futility would drive him mad unless out of it could come some
motive of action.
She was not only dead, but dead by the hands of murderers who had come
after him--and all that remained was the effort to avenge her. Like
waters moving slowly at first but swelling into freshet power, wrath
and insatiable thirst for vengeance swept him to a sort of madness.
Here he was kneeling over the unstirring woman he had loved while out
there were the murder hirelings who had brought about the tragedy. Her
closed and unaccusing eyes, exhorting him as passionate utterances
could not have done, incited him to a frenzy. At least some of these
culprits must go unshriven, and by his own hand to the death that
inevitably awaited himself.
And as Spurrier's flux of molten emotions seethed about that
determination a solidifying transition came over him and his brain
cleared of the blind spots of fury into the coherency of a plan.
Out there they would wait for a while to test the completeness of
their success. If he gave way to his passion and challenged them as
inclination clamored to do, they would dispatch him at leisure.
Just now he was willing enough to die, but entirely unwilling to die
alone. He craved company and a red journey for that final crossing. So
once more he looked down into the face on which there was no stir of
animation, then very gently bent and kissed the quiet lips.
"If you could come back to me," he chokingly whispered, "I'd unsay
everything, except that I love you. But if there's a meeting place
beyond, I'll join you soon--when I've made them pay for you."
He lifted her tenderly and, through his agitation, came a sudden
realization of how light she was as he laid her gently on his army
cot. After that he picked up his rifle and bulged out his pockets with
cartridges.
The cockloft above his room, which was reached by a ladder, had
windows which were really only loopholes and from there he could
better see into the tangle that sheltered his enemies.
He entertained no vain hope of rescue. He asked for no deliverance.
The story drew to its ending and he meant to cap it with the one
climax to which the last half hour had left anything of significance.
Since small things become vastly portentous when written into the
margin between life and death, he hoped that before he died he might
recognize the face of at least one of the men whom he meant to take
with him across the River of Eternity.
So, dedicating himself to that motive, he climbed the ladder.
Peering out through first one and then the other of the loopholes of
the cockloft, he waited, and it seemed to him that he waited
eternally. He began to fear that his self-sure attackers would content
themselves with an inactive vigil and that after all he was to be
cheated.
The sun was westering. The shadows were elongating. The sounds through
the woods were subtly changing from the voices of day to those of
approaching night.
Still he waited.
Outside also they were waiting; waiting to make sure that it was safe
to go in and confirm their presumption that he had fallen.
But when Spurrier had, in a little time as the watch recorded it,
served out his purgatorial sentence, he sensed a stir in the massed
banks of the laurel and thrust his rifle barrel outward in preparation
for welcome. A moment afterward he saw a hat with a downturned brim--a
coat with an upturned collar--a pair of shoulders that hunched slowly
forward with almost imperceptible movement. His mind had become a
calculating machine now, functioning with deliberate surety.
The unrecognizable figure out there was a hundred yards away and the
rifle he held would bore through the head under the hat crown at that
range as a gimlet bores through a marked spot on soft pine.
But a single shot would end the show. No one else would appear and
even the dead man would be hauled back by his heels--unidentified. He
would wait until he could make his bag of game more worth dying
for--more worth _her_ dying for!
Other ages seemed to elapse before the butternut figure showed
stretched at length in the tall grass outside the thicket and a second
hat appeared. Still Spurrier held his fire until three hats were
visible and the first man, having crawled to a tree trunk, had half
risen.
He realized that he could not much longer hold it. At any moment they
might rush the place in force of numbers, and from more than one side,
smothering his defense--and once in contact with the walls they would
need only a lighted torch.
So he sighted with target-range precision and fired, following the
initial effort with snap-shots at the second and third visible heads.
He had the brief satisfaction of seeing the first man plunge forward,
clawing at the earth with hands that dropped their weapon. He saw the
second stumble, recover himself, stumble again and then start crawling
backward with a disabled, crablike locomotion, while the third figure
turned, unharmed, and ran to cover. But at the same moment he heard
shouts and shots from the other side which called him instantly to the
opposite loophole and, once there, kept him pumping his rifle against
what appeared to be a charge of confused figures that he had no
leisure to inspect. They, too, fell back under the vigor of his
punishment, and Spurrier found himself reloading in a silence that had
come as suddenly as the noise of the onrush.
He had shot down two assailants, but both had been retrieved beyond
sight by their confederates, and the besieged man groaned with a
realization of defeated purpose. The sun was low now and soon it would
be too dark to see. Then the trappers would close in and take the rat
out of the trap. What he failed to do while daylight lasted, he would
never do.
In only one respect did his judgment fail him as he sought to forecast
the immediate future. It seemed to him that he had spent hours there
in the cockloft, whereas perhaps thirty minutes had elapsed.
He had been thinking of the pigeon, but had put aside hope as to
succor from that agency. Old Cappeze was not interested in pigeons.
The bird would go to roost in its dovecote and sit all night with its
head tucked placidly under its wing--and the plea for help unread on
its leg--and the lawyer would never think of looking into the
dovecote.
Now, since he had failed and must die unavenged--for the wounding of
two unidentified enemies failed of satisfaction--he must utilize what
was left of life intensively. Once more before he died, he wanted to
see the face of the woman whom he had forsworn; the woman who was
worth infinitely more than the tawdry regards for which he had given
her up.
So he went down the ladder and knelt beside the cot.
He laid his ear close to the bosom and could have sworn that it
fluttered to a half heartbeat.
Suddenly Spurrier closed his hands over his face and for the first
time in years he prayed.
"Almighty Father," he pleaded, "give her back to me! Give me one other
chance--and exact whatever price Thy wisdom designates."
* * * * *
To Toby Austin's meager farm, which abutted on that of Dyke Cappeze,
that afternoon had trudged Bud Hawkins. In all the mountain region
thereabout his name was well known and any man of whom you had asked
information would have told you that Bud was "the poorest and the
righteousest man that ever rode circuit."
For Bud was among other things a preacher. To use his own words, "I
farms some, I heals bodies some, an' I gospels some." And in each of
his avocations he followed faithfully the lights of his conscience.
His own farm lay a long way off, and now he was here as a visitor.
This afternoon he fared over to the house of Dyke Cappeze as was his
custom when in that neighborhood. He regarded Cappeze as a righteous
man and a "wrastler with all evil," and he came bearing the greetings
of a brotherhood of effort.
The sun was low when he arrived, and the old lawyer confessed to a
mild anxiety because of Glory's failure to return before the hour
which her clean-cut regularity fixed as the time of starting the
supper preparations.
"She took a carrier pigeon over to Aunt Erie Toppit's," explained
Dyke, "and I looked for her back before now."
"I sometimes 'lows, Brother Cappeze," asserted the visitor with an
enthusiasm of interest, "thet in these hyar days of sin when God don't
show Hisself in signs an' miracles no more, erbout ther clostest thing
ter a miracle we've got left, air ther fashion one of them birds kin
go up in ther air from any place ye sots hit free at an' foller ther
Almighty's finger pointin' home."
Cappeze told him that there was just now only one pigeon in the
dovecote, where the pair belonged, but that one he offered to show,
and idly be led the way to the place back above the henroosts.
It is, however, difficult for any man to sink his own absorptions in
those of another, and so it fell about that on the way Cappeze stopped
at the barn he was building and which was not yet quite complete.
"Brother Hawkins," he said, "as we go along I want to show you the
barn I've been planning for years--and at last have nearly realized."
In the crude, unfinished life of the hills, lean-tos and even rock
ledges are pressed into service as barns, but the man who has erected
an ample and sound structure for such a purpose, stamps himself as one
who "has things hung up," which is the mountain equivalent for
wealth.
"That barn," explained Cappeze, pausing before it in expansiveness of
mood, "is a thing I've wanted ever since I moved over here. A good
barn stands for a farm run without sloven make-shift--and that one
cost me well-nigh as much money as my dwelling house. I reckon it
sounds foolish, but to me that building means a dream come true after
long waiting. I've skimped myself saving to build it, and it's the
apple of my eye. If I saw harm come to it, I almost think it would
hurt me more than to lose the house I live in."
"I reckon no harm won't come ter hit, Brother Cappeze," reassured the
other. "Yit hit mout be right foresighted to insure hit erginst fire
an' tempest."
"Of course I will--when it's finished," said the other as he led the
way inside, and then as he played guide, he forgot the pigeons and
swelled with the pride of the builder, while time that meant life and
death went by, so that it was quite a space later that they emerged
again and went on to the destination which had first called them.
But having arrived there, the elder man halted and his face shadowed
to a disturbed perplexity.
"That's strange," he murmured. "One pigeon's inside--the hen--and
there's the cock _trying_ to get in. It's the bird Glory took with
her. It must have gotten away from her."
"'Pears like ter me," volunteered the preacher, "hit's got some
fashion of paper hitched on ter one leg. Don't ye dis'arn hit, Brother
Cappeze?"
Cappeze started as his eyes confirmed the suggestion. Hurriedly he ran
up the ladder to the resting plank where the bird crooned and preened
itself, plainly asking for admittance to its closed place of
habitation. Perhaps his excited manner alarmed the pigeon, which would
alight on Glory's shoulder without a qualm, for as the man reached out
his hand for it, it flutteringly eluded him and took again to the
air.
But now his curiosity was aroused. Possibly Glory meant to stay the
night at Aunt Erie's and had sent him her announcement in this form.
He went for grain and scattered it, and after repeated efforts
succeeded in capturing the messenger.
But when he loosened the paper and read it his face went abruptly
white and from his lips escaped an excited "Great God!"
He thrust the note into the preacher's hand and rushed indoors,
emerging after a few minutes with eyes wildly lit and a rifle in his
hands. Bud Hawkins understood, for he had read in the interval the
scribbled words:
Stopped at Jack Spurrier's house. It's surrounded. Men are
shooting at us on all sides.
Dyke Cappeze was the one man to whom Spurrier had confided both the
circumstances of his mysterious waylaying and the matter of the
rattlesnakes and now the father was not discounting the peril into
which his daughter had strayed.
"I'm going on ahead, Brother Hawkins," he announced. "I want you to
send out a general alarm and to follow me with all the armed men you
can round up." There he halted in momentary bewilderment. In that
sparsely peopled territory the hurried mustering of an adequate force
on such short order was in itself almost an impossibility. There were
no means of communication. Abruptly, the old lawyer wheeled and
pointed a thin and quivering index finger toward his beloved barn.
"There's just one way," he declared with stoical directness. "All my
neighbors will come to fight a fire. I've got to set my own barn to
get them here!"
Five minutes later the structure sent up its black massed summons of
smoke, shot with vermilion, as the shingles snapped and showed
glowingly against the black background of vapor, even in the
brightness of the afternoon.
Dyke Cappeze himself was on his way, and the preacher remaining behind
was meeting and dispatching each hurried arrival. As he did so his
voice leaped as it sometimes leaped in the zealot's fervor of
exhortation, and he sent the men out into the fight with rifle and
shotgun as trenchantly as he expounded peace from the pulpit.
When a dozen men had ridden away, scattering gravel from galloping
hoofs, he rode behind the saddle cantle of the last, for it was not
his doctrine to hold his hand when he sent others into battle. Also he
might be needed there as a minister, a doctor, or both.
As sunset began to wane to twilight the attackers who lay circled
about Spurrier's cabin found themselves growing restive.
And inside John Spurrier was a man reanimated by the faint signs of
life which he had discovered in Glory.
A pulse still fluttered in her heart, but it throbbed flickeringly and
its life spark was pallid. Every moment this malevolent pack held its
cordon close was as surely a moment of strangling her faint chance as
if their fingers had been physically gripping her soft throat. And he
could only kneel futilely beside her and wait!
From his loopholes upstairs he saw once more two hats and gave their
wearers shot for shot, but when they kept their rifles popping he
suspected their purpose and dashed across the floor in time to send
three rapidly successive bullets into a little group that had detached
itself from the timber on that side and was creeping toward the house.
One crawling body collapsed and lay sprawling without motion. Two
others ran back crouching low and were lost to sight.
So he swung pendulumlike from side to side, firing and changing base,
and when his second turn brought him to the window through which he
had shot his man, he saw that the body had already been removed from
sight.