While he waited, Spicer South's sister, the prematurely aged crone,
appeared in the kitchen door with the clay pipe between her teeth, and
raised a shading hand to gaze off up the road. She, too, understood the
tenseness of the situation as her grim, but unflinching, features
showed; yet even in her feminine eyes was no shrinking and on her face,
inured to fear, was no tell-tale signal beyond a heightened pallor.
Spicer South looked up at her, and jerked his head toward the house.
"Git inside, M'lindy," he ordered, curtly, and without a word she,
too, turned and disappeared.
But there was another figure, unseen, its very presence unsuspected,
watching from near by with a pounding heart and small fingers clutching
in wild terror at a palpitant breast. In this country, where human
creatures seemed to share with the "varmints" the faculty of moving
unseen and unheard, the figure had come stealthily to watch--and pray.
When Samson had heard that signal of the gunshots from a distant peak,
he had risen from the rock where he sat with Sally. He had said nothing
of the issue he must go to meet; nothing of the enemies who had brought
dogs, confident that they would make their run straight to his lair.
That subject had not been mentioned between them since he had driven
Tamarack away that afternoon, and reassured her. He had only risen
casually, as though his action had no connection with the signal of the
rifles, and said: "Reckon I'll be a-goin'."
And Sally had said nothing either, except good-by, and had turned her
face toward her own side of the ridge, but, as soon as he had passed
out of sight, she had wheeled and followed noiselessly, slipping from
rhododendron clump to laurel thicket as stealthily as though she were
herself the object of an enemy's attack. She knew that Samson would
have sent her back, and she knew that a crisis was at hand, and that
she could not support the suspense of awaiting the news. She must see
for herself.
And now, while the stage was setting itself, the girl crouched
trembling a little way up the hillside, at the foot of a titanic
poplar. About her rose gray, moss-covered rocks and the fronds of
clinging ferns. At her feet bloomed wild flowers for which she knew no
names except those with which she had herself christened them,
"sunsetty flowers" whose yellow petals suggested to her imagination the
western skies, and "fairy cups and saucers."
She was not trembling for herself, though, if a fusillade broke out
below, the masking screen of leafage would not protect her from the
pelting of stray bullets. Her small face was pallid, and her blue eyes
wide-stretched and terrified. With a catch in her throat, she shifted
from her crouching attitude to a kneeling posture, and clasped her
hands desperately, and raised her face, while her lips moved in prayer.
She did not pray aloud, for even in her torment of fear for the boy she
loved, her mountain caution made her noiseless--and the God to whom she
prayed could hear her equally well in silence.