All the blood seemed to curdle back to Dick Selmes’ heart. The warning words of the store-keeper seemed to burn in letters of fire into his brain. “There’ll be hell let loose directly,” Sampson had said. And now Hazel was at the mercy—or would be—of these savage fiends, for what could be done for long against the weight of numbers? He was back in the kitchen. One solitary candle was burning dimly.
“Can you shoot, Elsie?” he whispered hurriedly, making as if to hand her the shot-gun, which was loaded with Treble A. buckshot cartridges.
“Na, lad. A’ can do better nor that. Do you do the shutin’.”
She was rolling up her sleeves to the shoulders, displaying a pair of arms that would have been useful to a navvy or a drayman. At her feet lay a long-handled axe, rusty and blunt. This she now picked up, swinging it a couple of times aloft, but with the thick side of the head, not the edge, turned outwards.
“Yon’ll nae be movin’ as long as there’s a light,” she said. “They’ll be waiting until we’re in bed, as they’ll think, puir feckless loons. We’ll put it out the noo.”
Dick was moved to intense admiration for the cool intrepidity of the woman; at the art of generalship she displayed. Here, surely, was the true fighting blood of some old Highland or Border clan. Even he seemed to be taking a back seat. She put out the candle.
“Dinna shute till A’ give ye the wurrd,” she whispered.
The back door was in two parts. The upper one of these Elsie now noiselessly set a little open, so as to convey the idea that in a happy-go-lucky, careless, all-secure feeling, it had not been thought necessary to shut it. Then she stood back from the doorway, of course in black darkness, the axe, poised on high, held ready; its weight no more tax on her brawny arms than if it had been a quince switch.