But Creed was not listening. He had pulled the big pine bar that held the battened door in place, and now flung it wide, stepping to the threshold and beginning again,
“Boys——”
He uttered no further word. A rifle spoke, a bullet sang, passed through the cabin and buried itself in the old-fashioned chimneypiece. Creed fell where he stood. As he went down across the threshold, Nancy whirling around to the door, bent over his prostrate form.
Outside, the ruddy, shaken shine from a couple of lightwood torches which stood alone, where they had been thrust deep into the garden mould made strange gouts and blotches of colour on Nancy’s flower beds. A group of men halted, drawn together, muttering, just beyond the palings. Each had a handkerchief tied across the lower part of his face, a simple but effectual disguise.
Her groping hand came away from the prostrate man, red with blood; she dashed it across her brow to clear her eyes of blowing hair. At the moment a figure burst through the grove of saplings by the roadside, a tall old man whose long black beard blew across his mighty chest that laboured as he ran. His hat was off in his hand, his face raised; he had no weapon. With a gasp of relief Nancy recognised him, yet rage mounted in her, too.
“Yes—come a-runnin’,” she muttered fiercely. “Come look at what you and yo’rn have done!”
As he leaped into the clearing the old man’s great black eyes, full of sombre fire, swept the scene. They took in the prone figure across the threshold, the blood upon the doorstone, and on Nancy’s brow and hair.
“Air ye hurt? Nancy, air ye hurt?” he cried, in such a tone as none there had ever heard from him.
“Am I hurt?—No!” choked the old woman, trying to get a hold on Creed’s broad shoulders and drag him back into the room. “I ain’t hurt, but it’s no credit to them wolves that you call sons of yo’rn. They’ve got Pone out thar, ef they hain’t shot him yit. And they’ve killed the best man that ever come on this here mountain. Oh, Creed—my pore boy! You Doss Provine! Come here an’ he’p me lift him.” She reared herself on her knees and glared at the group by the gate. “He had no better sense than to take ye for men—to trust the word ye give, that he was safe when he opened the do’. Don’t you come a step nearer, Jep Turrentine,” she railed out at him suddenly, as the old man drew toward the gate. “I’ve had a plenty o’ you an’ yo’ sons this night. They’re jest about good enough to shoot me while I’m a-tryin’ to git this po’ dead boy drug in the house, an’ then burn the roof down over me an’ my baby chil’en. You Doss Provine, walk yo’se’f here an’ he’p me.”
Doss, who found the presence of Jephthah Turrentine reassuring, whatever his mother-in-law might say, slouched forward, and between them they lifted the limp figure.