Mrs. Laughton had found what she had been looking for all her life--the man under her bed.
Every night of her nearly thirty years of existence this pretty little person had stooped on her knees, before saying her prayers, and had investigated the space beneath her bed, a light brass affair, hung with a chintz valance; had then peered beneath the dark recess of the dressing-case, and having looked in the deep drawer of the bureau and into the closet, she fastened her door and felt as secure as a snail in a shell. As she never, in this particular business, seemed to have any confidence in Mr. Laughton, in spite of the fact that she admired him and adored him, neither his presence nor his absence ever made any variation in the performance. She had gone through the motions, however, for so long a time that they had come to be in a manner perfunctory, and the start she received on this night of which I speak made her prayers quite impossible.
What was she to do? She, a coward _par eminence_, known to be the most timorous of the whole family; her tremors at all sorts of imagined dangers affording laughter to the flock of sisters and brothers. Should she stay on her knees after having seen that dark shape, as if going on with her prayers, while revolving some plan of procedure? That was out of the question. Scream? She couldn't have screamed to save her life. Run? She could no more have set one foot before the other, than if her body had melted from the waist down. She was deadly faint and cold and shaking, and all in a second, in the fraction of a second, before she had risen from her stooping posture.
Oh, why wasn't it Virginia instead? Virginia had always had such heroic plans of making the man come out of his hiding-place at the point of her pistol; and Virginia could cock a pistol and wasn't covered with cold shivers at the sight of one, as she was. If it had only been Francie, whose shrill voice could have been heard over the side of the earth, or Juliet, whose long legs would have left burglar, and house, too, in the background between the opening and slamming of a door. Either of them was so much more fit than she, the chicken-hearted one of the family, to cope with this creature. And they were all gone to the wedding with Fred, and would not be at home till to-morrow; and Tom had just returned from the town and handed her his roll of bills, and told her to take care of it till he came back from galloping down to the works with Jules; and she had tucked it into her belt, and had asked him, a little quakingly, what if any of the men of the Dead Line that they had heard of or Red Dan or an Apache came along; and he had laughed, and said she had better ask them in and reproach them for making such strangers of themselves as not to have called in the two years she had been in this part of the country; and she had the two maids with her, and he should be back directly. And she had looked out after him a moment over the wide prairie to the hills, all bathed in moonlight, and felt as if she were a spirit alone in a dead world. And here she was now, the two maids away in the little wing, locked out by the main house, alone with a burglar, and not another being nearer than the works, a half-mile off.