"She took a carrier pigeon over to Aunt Erie Toppit's," explained d.y.k.e, "and I looked for her back before now."

"I sometimes 'lows, Brother Cappeze," a.s.serted the visitor with an enthusiasm of interest, "thet in these hyar days of sin when G.o.d 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. .h.i.t 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," rea.s.sured 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 s.p.a.ce 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 c.o.c.k _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 G.o.d!"

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.

d.y.k.e Cappeze was the one man to whom Spurrier had confided both the circ.u.mstances 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 spa.r.s.ely 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 ma.s.sed 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.

d.y.k.e 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.

CHAPTER XIV

It was a hopeless game and a grim one. He could not cover all the defenses long in single-handed effort, and the best he could hope for was to die in ample companionship. Now, two men had reached broad-girthed oaks, halfway between thicket and house. There they were safe for the next rush.

So this was the end of the matter! Spurrier reloaded his rifle and went down the ladder. Hastily he carried Glory into the room at the back and overturned his heavy table to serve as a final barricade. He elected to die here when they swarmed the door from which he could no longer keep them, crowning the battle with a finale of punishment as they crowded through the breach.

But the minutes dragged with irksome tension. He was keyed up now, wire-tight, for the finish, and yet silence fell again and denied him the relief of action. To Spurrier it was like a long and cruel delay imposed upon a man standing blindfolded and noosed on the scaffold trap. Then the quiet was ripped with a totally wasteful fusillade, as though every attacker outside were pumping his gun in a contest of speed rather than effect.

Spurrier smiled grimly. Let them burn their powder--he would have his till they ma.s.sed in front of his muzzle and the barrier fell.

"When the barrier fell!" Crouched there behind the table where he meant to sell his life in that brief s.p.a.ce that seemed long, the words brought with them the memory of one of the few poems that had ever meant much to him--and while he awaited death his mind seized upon the lines--a funeral address in soliloquy!

"For the journey is done and the summit attained, And the barriers fall----"

He strained his ears to his listening and then through his head ran other verses:

"I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, The best and the last!

I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes and forebore And bade me creep past----"

Was that a battering-ram against timber that he heard? He fingered the trigger.

"Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with G.o.d be the rest!"

But the door did not fall. The rifle cracking became interspersed with alarmed outcries of warning and confusion. He could even hear the brush torn with the hurried tramping of running feet, and then the pandemonium abruptly stopped dead, and after a long period of inheld breath there followed a loud rapping on the door and a voice of agonized anxiety shouted:

"In G.o.d's name open if ye're still alive. It's Cappeze--and friends!"

The psychological effect of that recognized voice upon John Spurrier, and of its incredible meaning, was strange to the point of grotesquerie. Its sound carried a complete reversal of everything to which his mind had been focussed with a tensity which had keyed itself to the acceptance of a violent death, and with the reversal came reaction. There was no interim of preparation for the altered aspect of affairs. It was precisely as though a runaway train furiously speeding to the overhang of an unbridged chasm had suddenly begun dashing in the contrary direction with no shade of lessening velocity, and no grinding of breaks to a halt between time.

Spurrier had taken no thought of physical strain. He had not known that he was wearied with nerve wrack and pell-mell dashing from firing point to firing point. He knew nothing of the picture he made with clothing torn from his scrambling rushes up-ladder and down-ladder and his crouching and shifting among the rough nail-studded s.p.a.ces of the c.o.c.kloft. Of the face, sweat-reeking and dust-smeared, he had no realization, but when that voice called out and he knew that rescuers were clamoring where a.s.sa.s.sins had laid siege, the stout knees under him buckled weakly, and the fingers that had fitted his rifle as steadily as part of its own metallic mechanism became so inert that they could scarcely maintain their grip upon the weapon.

John Spurrier, emotionally stirred and agitated as he had never been in battle, because of the limp figure that lay under that roof, stood gulping and struggling for a lost voice with which to give back a reply. He rocked on his feet and then, like a drunken man went slowly and unsteadily forward to lift the bar of the door.

When he had thrown it wide the rush of anxious men halted, backing up instinctively, as their eyes were confused by the inner murk and their nostrils a.s.sailed by the acrid stench of nitrate, from the vapors of burnt powder that hung stiflingly between the walls and ceiling rafters. Old Cappeze was at their front and when he saw before him the battle begrimed and drawn visage of the man, he looked wildly beyond it for the other face that he did not see, and his voice broke and rose in a high, thin note that was almost falsetto as he demanded: "Where is she? Where's Glory?"

John Spurrier sought to speak but the best he could do was to indicate with a gesture half appealing and half despairing to the door of the other room, where she lay on his army cot. The father crossed its threshold ahead of him and dropped to his knees there with agonized eyes, and Bud Hawkins, the preacher and physician, not sure yet in which capacity he must act, was bent at his shoulder, while Spurrier exhorted him with a recovered but tortured voice, "In G.o.d's name, make haste. There's only a spark of life left."

From the crowd which had followed and stood ma.s.sed about the door came a low but unmistakable smother of fury, as they saw the unmoving figure of the girl, and those at the edge wheeled and ran outward again with the summary resoluteness that one sees in hounds cast off at the start of the chase.