"You'd talk o' stones, would ye? Stones to me, that has lost the best friend surely ever man had? A man that would ha' laid down his very life for me; and now the niggers have got him and the ants have stripped his bones! O-o-oh!—" And throwing himself into a rough chair that the dead man himself had made, O'Hara sobbed like a little boy.
Matterson and Gleazen nodded to each other, as much as to say that it was too bad, but that no one had any call to take on to such an extent; and Gleazen with a shrug thrust a finger into that heap of stones, slowly, as if he could not quite believe his senses,—little he cared for any man's life!—while those of us who until now had been so hypnotized by horror that we had not laid down our packs dropped them on the floor.
"Ants," O'Hara had said: I knew now why the bones were so clean and white; why the feather was stripped from the quill.
From the windows of the hut, which stood in a clearing at the very top of the hill, we could see for miles through occasional vistas in the tall timber below us. The edge of the clearing, on all sides except that by which we had approached it, had grown into a tangled net of vines, which had crept out into the open space to mingle with saplings and green shrubs. Half way down the hill, where we had passed it in our haste, I now saw, by the character of the vegetation, was the spring from which issued the brook whose course we had followed.
Uncle Seth, who had been striving to appear at ease since the first shock of seeing the single occupant of the house, came over beside me; and after a few remarks, which touched me because they were so obviously a pathetic effort to win back my friendship and affection, said in a louder voice, "Thank God, we, at least, are safe!"
The word to O'Hara was like spark to powder.
Flaring up again, he shrieked, "Safe—you!—and you thank God for it! You white-livered milk-sop of a country storekeeper, what is your cowardly life worth to yourself or to any one else? You safe!" He swore mightily. "You! I tell you, Upham, there—" he pointed at the skeleton by the table—"there was a man! You safe!"
Withered by the contempt in the fellow's voice, Uncle Seth stepped back from the window, turned round, and, as if puzzling what to say next, bent his head.
As he did so, a single arrow flew with a soft hiss in through the window, passed exactly where his head had just that moment been, and with a hollow thump struck trembling into the opposite wall. There was not a sound outside, not the motion of a leaf, to show whence the arrow came. Only the arrow whispering through the air and trembling in the wall.
Uncle Seth, as yellow as old parchment, looked up with distended eyes at the still quivering missile.