XVIII.
Foreshadowed
Alida awoke, knowing what was to happen. She had dreamed of it, just before daylight, and lay in bed stupefied by the horror of it, living, again and again, through each frightful detail. It had happened—there, in the very room, and before the children; the noise of it had startled them; and then she woke and knew she had been dreaming. In the dream the noise had wakened the children—when it really happened they must never know. It wouldn’t be fair to them; they needed a “clean start.”
What had she done to keep them quiet? There had been a thunderous knocking at the door. She had expected it and was prepared; because the lock was feeble, she had shoved the old brown bureau against the door.
Nothing had happened. What a fool she was to lie there and think of it! There was the brown bureau against the wall; she could hear the deep breathing of Jim in the room beyond. Jim had been unequal to the task of conventionally going to bed the night before, and she had put a pillow under his head and a quilt over him. She was the last woman in the world to worry about Jim, drunk, or to nag him for it when sober. But she didn’t like the children to see him that way.
What was it that she had done to quiet the children when “they” rode up? She had done something and they had gone to sleep again, and she—and she—oh no, it hadn’t happened. What a fool she was to lie there thinking! There were the children to rouse and dress, and breakfast to cook, and Jim—Jim would be feeling pretty mean this morning; he’d like a good cup of coffee. She was glad he was alive to make coffee for.
She got up and, in the uncertainty bred of the dream, felt the brown bureau, felt it hungrily, almost incredulously. The brown bureau had been pushed against the door when they had come, and knocked and knocked. Then they had thundered with the butts of their six-shooters, and the children had wakened, and she had called out to them:
“Sh-sh! It’s only a bad dream. Mammy will give you some dough to bake to-morrow.”
And she had gone to press her face flat to the thin wall, and call, “For God’s sake, don’t wake the children!”
And they had called out, “Let him come out quiet, then.”
And then she could feel that they put their shoulders to the door—the weather-beaten door—with its crazy lock that didn’t half catch. The brown bureau had spun across the floor like a top, and they had crowded in. Then she had done something to quiet the children—it was queer that she could not remember what it was, when everything else in the dream still lived within her, horribly distinct and real.
What a fool she was, with Jim asleep in the next room; she would not think about it another minute. She began to dress, but her fingers were heavy, and the vague oppression of nightmare blocked her efficiency. Repeatedly she would detect herself subconsciously brooding over some one of the links in that pitiless memory—what they had said to Jim; his undaunted replies; how she had left him and gone into the next room because Jim had told her to.
She called the children, but the sight of them, happy and flushed with sleep, did not reassure her.
“Mammy,” said Topeka, eldest of the family, and lately on the invalid list, the victim of a cactus thorn, “my toe’s all well; can I go barefoot?”
“Topeka Rodney, what kind of feet do you expect to have when you are a young lady, if you run barefoot now?”
Topeka, sitting on the side of the bed, with tousled hair, put her small feet together and contemplated them. The toe was still suspiciously inflamed for perfect convalescence, although Topeka, with a Spartan courage that won her a place in the annals of household valor, had the day before allowed her mother to pick out with a needle the torturing cactus thorn, scorning to shed a tear during the operation, though afterwards she had taken the piece of dried apple that was offered her and devoured it to the last bite, as only just compensation for her sufferings.
“Dimmy dot a tore toe, too.” But Jimmy showed a strange reticence about offering proofs of his affliction. At the peril of his equilibrium, he clasped the allegedly injured member in his chubby hand and rolled over on the bed in apparent anguish.
“Less see, Jimmy,” asked his mother, anxiously.
“Don’t bleeve him, mammy. He ’ain’t ever cried. He’d a cried, for sure, if his toe was sore.” At the age of five, little Judith, namesake of her aunt, was something of a doubting Thomas.
“Let mammy see, Jimmy,” and Alida bent over her son and heir.
“Doth Dimmy det any apple?” The wee man sometimes succeeded in making terms with his mother, when the other children were not present. Though feeling himself a trifle over-confident, he held the disputed toe with the air of one keeping back a trump card, and looked his mother squarely in the eyes.
She struggled with the temptation to give him the apple. He had lifted the horrors of her dream as nothing else could have done, but she answered him with quiet firmness.
“Jimmy must not tell stories.”
“Less see,” insisted Topeka.
“He dassent,” affirmed Judith, junior, of little faith.
“It hurths me,” and Jimmy tried to squeeze out a tear. “It hurths me, my tore toe!”
His mother tipped him over on his fat little back and opened the chubby hand that held the trump toe. It was white from the pressure applied by the infant dissembler, but there was no trace of the treacherous cactus thorn. She gave him an affectionate spank and went into the kitchen to make coffee.
“I with I had a tore toe,” he crooned, quite unabashed at the discovery of his deception. “I with I toud det a tore toe ’thout the hurt.”
But the horror of the dream gripped her when she found herself alone in the kitchen; and she remembered she had not told the children not to go into the room where their father was sleeping. She went back and found that Jimmy had not left his post on the side of the bed, where he still regretted that his perfectly well toe did not entitle him to gastronomic consideration. Topeka, who had arrived at an age where little girls, in the first subconscious attempt at adornment, know no keener delight than plastering their heads with a wet hairbrush, till they present an appearance of slippery rotundity equalled only by a peeled onion, put down the brush with guilty haste at sight of her mother.
“I’m goin’ to dress him soon as I’ve done my hair.”
“Any one think you was goin’ to be married, the time you’ve took to it.”
“It’s gettin’ so long,” urged Topeka.
“I wouldn’t give it a chance to grow no longer while Jimmy was waitin’ to get dressed. And don’t go into the front room. Your father’s gettin’ his sleep out.”
Topeka opened her round eyes. There was always something suspicious about that sleep her father had to get out, but she felt it was something she must not ask questions about. Her mother lingered; she dreaded to be alone in the kitchen. The little, familiar intimacies between herself and her children scattered the horrors of the dream which would come back to her when she was again at the mercy of her thoughts.
“Judy, s’pose you dress Jimmy this morning! I want Topeka to help me get breakfast.”
“Yessum,” said Judith, dutifully. “Is he to have his face washed?”
“He certainly is, Judy. I’s ashamed to have you ask such a question. ’Ain’t you all been brought up to have your faces washed?”
But young Judith seemed disinclined to take up this phase of family superiority. She merely inquired further:
“Is he to have it washed with soap, maw?”
“He shore is. Any one would think you had been born and raised in Arizony or Nebrasky, to hear you talk. I’m plumb ashamed of you, Judy.”
“But, ’deed, maw, I ain’t big enough to wash his face with soap. It takes Topeka to hold his head.”
The subject of the discussion still sat on the edge of the bed, a small lord of creation, letting his women folk arrange among themselves who should minister to his wants. As an instrument of torture the washcloth, in the hands of his sister Judy, was no ignoble rival of the cactus thorn. The question of making terms for his sufferings again appealed to him in the light of a feasible business proposition.
“Muvvy, tan’t I have the apple? Judy hurts me a lot when she wathes my face wis soap.”
“Yes, you can have the apple, honey; and, Judy, you be gentle with him. Don’t rub his features up, and be careful and don’t get soap in his eyes.”
“No’m.” And Judy heroically stifled the longing to slick her hair, like Topeka’s, with the wet hairbrush. There were easier tasks than washing the face of her younger brother.
When Topeka and her mother were alone in the kitchen, Topeka grinding the coffee and all unconsciously working her jaw in an accompaniment to the coffee-mill, her mother bent over her and said:
“Did you dream of anything last night?”
Topeka simultaneously stopped working the coffee-mill and her jaw, and regarded her mother solemnly. She did not remember having been thus questioned about her dreams before.
“No’m,” she answered, after laborious consideration. But something in her mother’s face held her.
“You’re sure you didn’t dream nothing?”
“Yes, maw.”
“Did Judy or Jim say that they dreamed anything?”
“Jim said he dreamed he had a pup.”
“Was that all? Think hard, Topeka!”
Topeka held the handle of the coffee-mill in her hand; her jaw continued to work with the labor of her mental process. “I’ve thought hard, maw, and all he told was about the pup.”
Alida went back to her bedroom and again felt the brown bureau. “What’s the matter with me, anyhow? It’s the lonesomeness, and they bein’ agin Jim the way they are. God, this country’s hard on women and horses!”
When breakfast was over, and young Jim had received the reward of his valor in presenting a brave face to his ablution, and Judith the reward of her skill, the evidence of which almost prevented the young martyr from smiling while he enjoyed his treat, their mother sent them all to play in the cañon. She told them not to come home till she should come for them, and if any one should ask about their father, to say that he was away from home. And this, as well as the mystery of her father’s “getting his sleep out,” roused some slight apprehension in Topeka, who was old for her age. They were seldom sent to the cañon to play. Topeka looked at her mother as she had when questioned about the dream, but there was no further confidence between them.
“You do as your sister Topeka tells you, and remember what I said about your papa,” Alida said to the younger children. Jim and Judy clasped each other’s hands in mute compact at the edict. Their sister Topeka had a real genius for authority; they were minded all too well when she swayed the maternal sceptre vicariously.
Alida made fresh coffee for Jim when the children had gone. She made it carefully; there was this morning, unconsciously, about each little thing that she did for him, the solemnity of a funeral rite. Struggle as she would, she could not divest her mind of the conviction that what she did this day she did for the dead. She would go to the door and listen to his breathing, and tell herself that she was a fool, then wring her hands at the remembrance of the dream.
As he tossed, half waking, she heard him groan and curse the cattle-men with oaths that made her glad she had sent the children from home. Then she bent over him and woke him from his uneasy slumber.
“Jim, don’t you want me to bathe your head? And here’s some nice, hot coffee all ready for you.”
Jim woke slowly to a realization of his troubles and his blessings. His wife was bathing his head with hands that trembled. Not always had she greeted his indiscretions with such loving forbearance. He noticed, though his waking faculties were not over-keen, that her face was pale and frightened, and that her eyes, meeting his, held a dumb, measureless affection.
“What th’ hell are you babying me for?” But his roughness did not deceive her woman’s wits. He was not getting the lecture he anticipated, and this was his way of showing that he was not embarrassed by her kindness. The morning sunlight was pitilessly frank in its exposure of the grim pinch of poverty in the mean little room, but the woman was unconscious of these things; what she saw was that Jim, the reckless, Jim, the dare-devil terror of the country, Jim, who had married and settled with her into home-keeping respectability, Jim, who had struggled with misfortune and fallen, had, young as he was, lost every look of youth; that hope had gone from his dull eyes, and that his face had become drawn until the death’s-head grinned beneath the scant padding of flesh. But he was to-day, as always, the one man in the world for her. In making a world of their own and reducing their parents to supplementary consideration, their children, whom she had sent away that she might be alone with him, had given a different quality to the love of this pair that had known so many curious vicissitudes. The responsibilities of parenthood had placed them on a tenderer, as well as a securer footing; and as she saw his age and weariness, he recognized hers, and both felt a self-accusing twinge.
“That’s a blamed good cup of coffee,” he said, by way of relieving the tension that had crept into the situation. “Any one would think you was settin’ your cap for me ’stead of us being married for years.”
Alida sighed. “It’s better to end than to begin like this,” she said, in the far-away voice of one who thinks aloud. The word “end” had slipped out before she realized what she was saying, and the knowledge haunted her as an omen. She glanced at him quickly, to see if he had noticed it.
“Why did you say end?” He saw that her eyes were full of tears and chafed her. “You ain’t thinking of divorcing me, like Mountain Pink done Bosky?”
“Oh, Jim,” she said, and her face was all aquiver, “I never could divorce you, no matter what you done.” And then the grim philosophy of the plains-woman asserted itself. “I never can understand why women feed their pride on their heart’s blood; it never was my way.”
He did not like to remember that he had given her cause for a way. “There’s a lot of women as wouldn’t exactly regard me as a Merino, or a Southdown, either;” he gulped the coffee to ease the tightness in his throat.
“They’d be women of no judgment, then,” she said, with conviction.
Jim’s head was tilted back, resting in the palm of his hand. His profile, sharpened by anxiety, more than suggested his quarter-strain of Sioux blood. He might almost have been old Chief Flying Hawk himself, as he looked steadily at the woman who had been a young girl and reckless, when he had been a boy and reckless; who had paid her woman’s penalty and come into her woman’s kingdom; who had made a man of him by the mystery of her motherhood, and who had uncomplainingly gone with him into the wilderness and become an alien and an outcast.
These things unmanned him as the sight of the gallows and the rope for his hanging could not have done. Shielding himself with an affected roughness, he asked:
“What the hell’s the matter with you? I’ve been drinking like a beast of an Indian, and you give me coffee instead of a tongue-lashing.”
The color had all gone out of her face. She gasped the words:
“Jim, I dreamed it last night—they came for you!”
She cowered at the recollection.
“Did they get me?” he asked. There was no surprise in his tone. He spoke as one who knew the answer.
“Yes, the children saw. The noise woke them.”
“You mustn’t let ’em see, when—they come. They’ve a right to a fair start; we didn’t get it, old girl.”
“The children gave it to us,” and she faced him.
“Yes, yes, but we want them to have it from the start, like good folks.”
They looked into each other’s eyes. The memory of dead and gone madness twinkled there a moment, then each remembered:
“You must hurry, Jim. You haven’t a moment to lose. I dreamed it was to be to-night—they’ll come to-night!”
“The game’s all up, old girl! If I had a month I couldn’t get away. Morrison’s been looking for me over to the Owl Creek Range; he’s back—Stevens told me yesterday. He’ll be heading here soon. The price on my head is a strain on friendship.”
“Have the sheep-men gone back on you?”
“Yes, damn them! A thousand dollars is big money, and they’ve had hard luck!”
“They deserve it; I hope every herd in the State dies of scab.”
“There wasn’t a scabby sheep in our bunch. What a sight they were, loaded with tallow! There wasn’t one of them that couldn’t have weathered a blizzard; they could have lived on their own tallow for a month.”
She tried to divert his attention from his lost flock. When he began to talk about them the despair of his loss drove him to drink. She was ground between the millstones of his going or staying. If he stayed they would come for him; if he went, they would apprehend him before he was ten miles from the house.
“Jim, we got to think. If there’s a chance in a thousand that you can get away, you got to take it; if there ain’t, the children mustn’t know. We got to think it out!”
“There ain’t a chance in a thousand, old girl. There ain’t one in a million. They’re circling round in the hills out here now, waitin’ for me, like buzzards waitin’ for the eyes of a dyin’ horse.”
She rocked herself, and the clutching fingers left white marks on her face, but the eyes that met his glittered tearless:
“Then there ain’t nothing left but to face it like a man?”
“That’s all there be.” He might have been giving an opinion on a matter in which he had no interest.
“Then there ain’t no use in our having any more talk about it?”
“’Tain’t just what you’d call an agreeable subject,” he answered, with the sinister humor of the frontiersman who has learned to make a crony of death.
She was tempted to kiss him—they were not given to demonstrations, this pair—then decided it were kinder to him, less suggestive of what they anticipated, not to deviate from their undemonstrative marital routine.
“Do you want your breakfast now?”
“I guess you might bring it along.”
And for the same reason that she refrained from kissing him, she repressed a desire to wring the neck of a young broiler and cook it for his breakfast, remembering that she had heard they gave folks pretty much what they wanted when they wouldn’t want it long. So Jim got his usual breakfast of bacon, uncooked canned tomatoes, soda-biscuit, and coffee. She sat with him while he ate, but they spoke no more of “them” or of how soon “they” might be expected. She told him that young Jim had pretended that morning that he had a cactus thorn in his foot, so that he might have a piece of dried apple. And old Jim, in an excess of parental fondness and pride, said: “The damned little liar, he’ll get to Congress yet!”
But the children were a dangerous topic for overstrained nerves at this particular time, so Alida told Jim that she had put the black hen to set and she thought they’d have some chickens at last. Jim smoked while Alida washed the dishes, and when Jim’s back was turned she examined the lock on the door—a good push would open it. Then she looked at the brown bureau, and the recklessness of despair came into her eyes. In the room beyond, Jim was reading a two weeks’ old newspaper and smoking. He looked like a lazy ranchman taking his ease.
As she went about her household tasks that morning, Alida noticed things as she had never noticed them before. A sunbeam came through the shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as if it were a live thing. She read a warning in this, and in the color of the sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the grasshoppers, that was sinister and threatening. The creeks had dried, and their slimy beds crept along the willows like sluggish snakes. Gaunt range-cattle bellowed in their thirst, and the parched earth crackled beneath the sun that hung above the house like a flaming disk. Sometimes she sank beneath the burden of it; then she would wring her hands and call on God to help them; they were beyond human power. She and Jim were alone all the morning; they did not again refer to what they knew would happen. He read his old paper and she put her house in order. She did it with especial care. It was meet to have things seemly in the house of the dead. And every time she glanced at Jim she repressed the desire to fling herself on his breast and cry out the anguish that consumed her.
At noon she brought the children home to dinner, and afterwards Jim taught them to throw the lasso and played buffalo with them. Alida did not trust herself to watch them; she stayed in the kitchen and saw the sunbeam grow pale with the waning of the day, the day whose minutes dragged like lead, yet had rushed from her, leaving her the night to face. At sundown she cooked supper, but she no longer knew what she did. A crazy agility had taken possession of her and she spun about the kitchen, doing the same errand many times, finding herself doing always something different from that she had set about doing. The molten day was burning itself out like a fever; hot gusts of air beat up from the earth, but the woman who waited felt chilled to the marrow, and took a cloak down from a peg and wrapped it about her while she waited for the biscuit to bake. At supper they sat down together, the man and his wife and their three children. The children were in fine spirits from the fun they had had that afternoon. Never had daddy been so nice to them. He had taught Topeka to throw the lasso so well that she had caught the cat once and little Jim twice; and daddy had played he was a buffalo and had charged them all with his head down, till they screamed in terror. But daddy seemed more quiet through the meal, and once mother started up and cried:
“What’s that?”
She ran to the door with her hand pressed to her side, but daddy called after her:
“Don’t you know the cowards better than that? They’ll wait for nightfall.”
But these things had not worried the children, with their heads full of playing buffalo and throwing the lariat.
“Jim,” said his father, before they went to bed, “remember you are the man of the family.” But young Jim was already nodding with sleep. Topeka and Judith were sleepy, too; they kissed their father and were glad to go to bed.
The night began menacingly to close over the wilderness. Where the sun had hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool of red that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The outlines of the foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the half-light it seemed a world struggling in the birth-throes. All day the dry, burning heat had quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves flickering over a bed of live coals, and now the very earth seemed to palpitate with the intensity of its fever. The bellowing of the thirst-maddened cattle had not stopped with the twilight that brought no dew to slake their parched throats. In the hills the coyotes wailed like lost souls. It was night bereft of benisons, day made frightful by darkness. All the heat of a cycle of desert summers seemed concentrated in that house in the valley where the man and his wife waited. Each sound of the desert night Alida translated into the trampling of horses’ feet; then, as the sound would die away, or prove to be but some night noise of the wilderness, the pallor would lose its pinch on her features, and she would stare into her husband’s face with eyes that did not see. Jim smoked his pipe and refilled it, smoked and filled again, but gave no sign of the object of his waiting.
“Jim,” she said, when the clock had struck ten, then eleven, “I am going to fasten up the house.”
“Do you hear them?” he asked, without emotion, but as one who deferred to the finer senses of women.
She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.
He looked at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till it barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness he put into:
“Oh, you poor little fool, do you think you could keep them out by fastening that?”
“Jim, I must,” and her voice broke. “They may think you are not here, that it’s only me and the children, and that’s why the house is fastened.” She got up and began to move about as though her thoughts scourged her to action, even if futile. He shook the ashes from his pipe.
“Do anything you blame please,” he said, more by way of humoring her than from faith in her stratagem. He felt strong enough to face his destiny, to meet it in a way worthy of his mother’s people.
Alida seemed under a spell in her preparations for the night. Each thing she did as she had done it in her dream the night before; it was as if she were constrained by a power greater than her will to fulfil a sinister prophecy. Yet now and then she would stop and wonder if she might not break the spell by doing things differently from the way she had dreamed them. Her hand grasped the knob of the door uncertainly, and she swung it to and fro on its creaking hinges, while her mind seemed likewise to sway hither and thither. Should she fasten the door and push the bureau against it, as it had been in the dream, or should she leave door and windows gaping wide for them? And then, as one who walks and does familiar things in sleep, she shut the door and turned the key. Jim smiled at her, but she could no longer look at him. One of the children wailed fretfully from the room beyond. Sleep had become a scourge in the stifling heat. One by one she lowered the windows and nailed them down; then she dragged the brown bureau against the door, took the brace of six-shooters from the wall, and sat down with Jim to wait.
“What are you going to do with them toys?” he asked, as he saw her examine the chambers of one of the six-shooters.
“You ain’t going to let yourself be caught like a rat in a hole, are you?” she reproached him.
“’Ain’t we agreed that it’s best to keep onpleasant family matters from the kids?” He smiled at her bravely. “The remembrance of what we’re anticipatin’ ain’t going to help young Jim to get to Congress when his time comes, nor it ain’t going to help the girls get good husbands, either. This here country ain’t what it was in the way of liberality since it’s got to be a State.”
“Sh-sh-sh!” she said. “Is that the range-cattle stampedin’ after water, or is it—” They listened. The furniture in the room crackled; there was not a fibre of it to which the resistless heat had not penetrated. On the range the cattle bellowed in their thirst-torture; in the intervals of their cries sounded something far off, but regular as the thumping of a ship’s screw. The woman did not need an answer to her question. The steady trampling of hoofs came muffled through the dead air, but the sound was unmistakable. She put her arms about the man’s neck and crushed him to her with all her woman strength. “Oh, Jim, you’ve been a good man to me!”
“Steady—steady.” He strained her close to him. “They’d be, by the sound of them, on the straight bit of road now, before the turn. Soon we’ll hear their hoofs ring hollow as they cross the plank bridge.”
His plainsman’s faculty was as keen as ever; his calculation of the horsemen’s distance was made as though he were the least concerned. All Alida’s courage had gone, with the dread thing at hand. She clung to him, dazed.
“They’re sober, all right enough.”
“How do you know?”
“They’d be cursing and bellowing if they were drunk.”
The hoofs rang hollow on the little plank bridge that crossed the ditch about a stone’s-throw from the door. Not a word was said either within or without. The lynchers seemed to have drilled for their part; there was no whispering, no deferring to a leader. On they came, so close that Jim and Alida could hear the creaking of their saddles. There was the clank of spurs and the straining of leather as they dismounted, then some one knocked at the door till the warped boards rattled.
Jim could feel the thudding of Alida’s heart as she clung to him, but when the knock was repeated a new courage came to her, and she left Jim and went on her knees close to the outer wall.
“Jim, is that you?” she called, and now every sense was trained to battle; her voice had even a sleepy cadence, as if she had been suddenly roused.
“That won’t do at all, Miz Rodney. We know you got Jim in there, just as certain as we’re out here, and we want him to come out and we’ll do the thing square, otherwise he can take the consequences.”
Jim opened his mouth to speak, but she, still on her knees beside the wall, gained his silence by one supplicating gesture. There was a sleepy, fretful cry from the room beyond—the noise had roused one of the children.
“Sh-sh, dear,” she called. “It’s only a bad dream. Go to sleep again; mother is here.”
Through the warped door came sounds of the whispering voices without, drowned by the shrieking bellow of the cattle. There was not a breath of air in the suffocating room. Jim bent towards Alida:
“I’m goin out to ’em. They’ll do it square, over on the cotton-woods; this rumpus’ll only wake the kids.”
But she shook her head imploringly, putting her finger to her lips as a sign that he was not to speak, and he had not the heart to refuse, though knowing that she made a desperate situation worse.
“Gentlemen”—she spoke in a low, distinct voice—“Jim ain’t here. He’s been away from home five days. There’s no one here but me and the children; you’ve woke them up and frightened them by pounding on the door. I ask you to go away.”
“If he ain’t in there, will you let us search the house?” It was Henderson that spoke, Henderson, foreman of the “XXX” outfit.
“I can’t have them frightened; please take my word and go away.”
“Whas er matter, muvvy?” called Judith, sleepily. Young Jim was by this time crying lustily. Only Topeka said nothing. With the precocity of a frontier child, she half realized the truth. She tried to comfort little Jim, though her teeth chattered in fear and she felt cold in the hot, still room. Then Judith called out, “Make papa send them away.”
“Your papa ain’t here, Judith.” But the fight had all gone out of Alida’s voice; it was the groan of an animal in a trap.
“Where’s papa gone to?”
“Sh-sh, Judith! Topeka, keep your sister quiet.”
It was absolutely still, within and without, for a full minute. Then Alida heard the shoving of shoulders against the door. Once, twice, thrice the lock resisted them. The brown bureau spun across the room like a child’s toy. The lynchers, bursting in, saw Alida with her arms around Jim. When the last hope had gone it was instinct with her to protect him with her own body.
“Go into the kids, old girl, this is no place for you.” And there was that in his voice that made her obey.
Something of the glory of old Chief Flying Hawk, riding to battle, was in the face of his grandson.
“Remember, the children ain’t to know,” he said to his wife; and to the lynchers, “Gentlemen, I’m ready.”