It was significant that no one spoke of Matterson. The silence as regarded his name marked a certain fatalism, which now possessed us—something akin to despair, yet not so ignoble as despair; something akin to resolution, yet not so praiseworthy as resolution. There seemed, indeed, nothing to say about him. Bull was dead, I thought, and Matterson was dead; and even if the blacks dared not rush upon us and take the hut by storm, they would soon kill us by thirst. We had done our best; if worst came to worst, we would die with our boots on.
Meanwhile queer low cries out in the forest were rising little by little to shrill yells and hoots and cat-calls. If we could judge by the sounds, there were hundreds of blacks, if not thousands.
"O Bull! You poor, deluded fool!" O'Hara cried. "Now why—why—why did he go and build the house on a king's grave?"
Why indeed?
It was a fearful thing to hear those cries and yells; yet, although we watched from door and windows a long while, we did not actually see any further sign of danger, until Arnold Lamont, who was guarding the door, said in a subdued voice, "Look—down the hill—half-way down. Something has moved twice."
As we gathered behind him, he turned and with a quick gesture said, "Do not leave the windows. Who knows what trick they may try upon us?"
My uncle, who seemed for the moment to comprehend all that was going forward, and Abe Guptil and Gleazen, went back to the windows, although it was evident enough that their minds were not so much on their own duty as on whatever it was that had caught Arnold's attention.
"See!" said Arnold.
There was nothing down there now that seemed not to belong by nature to the place, and I surmised that Arnold had seen only some small animal. But that a black object, appearing and disappearing, had revealed more to the others than to me, I immediately apprehended.
"It was fifty feet farther down the hill when I first distinguished it," said Arnold.