"Safe, you say?" cried Gleazen with a hoarse laugh, still letting those little stones fall between his fingers. The man at times was a fiend for utter recklessness. "Aye, safe on the knees of Mumbo-Jumbo!"
I heard this, of course, but in a singularly absent way; for at that moment, when every man of us was staring at the arrow in the wall, I, strangely enough, was thinking of the girl at the mission.
CHAPTER XXII
SIEGE
Much as I hated and distrusted Cornelius Gleazen,—and in the months since I first saw him sitting on the tavern porch in Topham he had given me reason for both,—I continually wondered at his reckless nonchalance.
As coolly as if he were in our village store, with a codfish swinging above the table, instead of a skeleton leaning against it, and with a boy's dart trembling in a beam, instead of an arrow thrust half through the wall—with just such a grand gesture as he had used to overawe the good people of Topham, he stepped to the door and brushed his hair back from his forehead. The diamond still flashed on his finger; his bearing was as impressive as ever.
"Well, lads," he said,—and little as I liked him, his calmness was somehow reassuring,—"there may be a hundred of 'em out there, but again there may be only one. First of all, we'll need water. I'll fetch it."
From a peg on the wall he took down a bucket and, returning to the door, stepped out.
In the clearing, where the hot sun was shining, I could see no sign of life.