"He was always a careful man," Gleazen remarked with a glance at the skeleton heaped up in the shadow of the wall. "I thought he would have provided a bag."
Gleazen and Matterson then, with pains not to miss a single one, picked up the stones by handfuls and let them rattle into the bag like shot.
"And now," said Gleazen, when the last one was in and the neck of the bag was tied, "once more: hands off!"
Laying the bag beside the skeleton, he took his stand in front of it, with Matterson and O'Hara on his right and left.
So far as the three of them were concerned, we might have been killed a dozen times over, had anyone seen fit to attack us. But Abe and I, all the time keeping one eye on the strange scene inside the cabin, had kept watch also for trouble from without, and all the time not a thing had stirred in the clearing.
"What," Matterson again asked, still watching Arnold curiously, "what are you going to do now?"
Tipping the table up on one side and wrenching off one of the boards that formed the top of it, Arnold placed it across a window, so that there was a slit at the bottom through which we could watch or shoot.
"Now, there's an idea!" Gleazen exclaimed. But he never stirred from in front of the skeleton and the bag.
"There are nails in the table," said Arnold.