“Better let me go, Pap,” said Wade, and Judith mutely stared after the old man as he disappeared into the dark.
For fifteen minutes or more the watchers on the cliff waited and trembled, straining ears and eyes. In that time they were joined by those from the foot of the bluff, all but Stribling, who, the boys said, had “gone on home.” Then they heard sounds of clambering in the cleft, and the old man’s face appeared in the well of inky shadow, pale, the black eyes burning, the great black beard flowing backward to join the darkness behind him. Wade held his lantern high. It lit a circle of faces on which terror, anger, and distress wrought. Judith could scarcely look at her uncle, and a great trembling shook her limbs, so that she laid hold of a little sapling by which she stood, and closed her eyes.
“Well,” said the old man on a falling note, and his voice sounded hollowly from the cleft, “well, I reckon this does settle it—whether Blatch is hurt or no. How many of ye was a-workin’ in the still to-night?”
“I was,” quavered Jim Cal; “me and Taylor Stribling and Buck Shalliday. Blatch had left a run o’ whiskey that had to be worked off, and when he didn’t come I turned in to ’tend to it—why, Pap?”
“Ef Bonbright wanted to find out about the still he shore made it, that’s all,” answered Jephthah. “Ye can see right into it from whar he went. Ef you-all boys wants to stay out o’ the penitentiary I reckon Creed Bonbright’s got to leave the Turkey Tracks mighty sudden,” and he swung himself heavily to the level of the cliff.
“That’s what I say,” whispered Jim Cal, pasty pale and quivering. “We’ve got it to do.”
Old Jephthah looked darkly upon his sons.
“Well, settle it amongst ye, how an’ when. I’ll neither meddle nor make in this business. I don’t know how all o’ this come about, nor what you-all an’ Blatch Turrentine air up to. You’ve made an outsider o’ me, an’ an outsider I’ll stay. Ef ye won’t tell me the truth, don’t tell me no lies. Come on, gals.”
He strode into the homeward trail, the four girls falling in behind his tall figure. Judith was sick with misery and uncertainty; the Lusk girls looked back timidly at Andy and Jeff; even Huldah was mute.