“Nothing,” I sobbed under my breath, as a vision of all the nothings I had done in my life came before me with a flash of the lightning that seemed to illumine the inside of the very inner me.
“And that other woman suffering in there, why don’t I go to her?” I demanded of myself, and failed to find an answer.
“Afraid of the roughness of some mountain man who would scarcely dare harm your brother’s ‘woman’?” I asked contemptuously from above my own breast. “You a ‘woman,’ if you let another woman watch her child die alone!”
Desperate at this goad, I sat up, and was pushing back the quilt, when the muffled sound of heavy boots came from across the clearing, and in another flash I saw a file of men, each one of whom looked ten feet tall, each with a gun on his arm, come out of the black woods and turn to the front of the house. I melted back to cover, and lay drawing breath like a drowning man.
Quietly they came into the room next to that in which I was hiding, and their drawly voices had a subdued and terrible sound as they exchanged a few remarks in guarded tones.
“Leader come?” one man asked from so near the pine board against which I trembled that he couldn’t have been a foot away from me.
“Naw; and Bill is waiting in the woods to ketch him ’fore he gits here, if he kin,” came the mumble of my host’s big voice.
“It’ll be nip and tuck ’twixt ’em, and lay out the worst man feet due west,” another voice took up the gruesome chorus.
“That’s Bill now, coming outen the woods,” exclaimed Stivers, ominously. “I reckon he thinks he missed Leader. Don’t nobody say nothing when he comes in, but let him set and wait for his knock-out. Nobody’s business but Leader’s.”
Listening frantically, I heard the doomed man’s hesitating feet shuffle into the room and the chair groan as he took his seat amid the glum silence.
And there I lay, and with Bill I waited I didn’t know for what, some nameless horror that would kill the life in me and make me a dishonored thing all my life--a human too cowardly to cry out the word of warning to another of God’s creatures. And through it all the little child wailed and the woman moaned.
Then in the midst of another thick muttering from the head of Old Harpeth, which was followed by a vivid flash, I heard another pair of feet step on the threshold of the cabin. I cowered under the quilt, held my breath, and took the bullet into my own heart--or thought I did.