Of that we never spoke again. Some thought one thing; some, another. We had no heart to argue it.
Poor Uncle Seth! What he had done in his youth that brought him at last to that bitterly tragic end, perhaps no other besides Cornelius Gleazen really knew, and Cornelius Gleazen, be it said to his everlasting credit, never told. But for all that, I was to learn a certain story long afterward and far away. Not one man in hundreds of thousands pays such a penalty for blasphemous sins of his mature years; and whatever Seth Upham had done, however dark the memory, it had been a boy's fault, which he had so well lived down that, when Cornelius Gleazen came back to Topham, no one in the whole world, except those two, would have believed it of him.
In that grim, threatening silence, which enfolded us like a thick, new blanket, we forgot our own quarrel; we almost forgot the very cause for which we had risked, and now bade fair to lose, our lives.
We were six men, two of us wounded, three of us arrant desperadoes, but all of us at least white of skin, surrounded by a black horde that was able, if ever it knew its own power, to wipe us at one blow clean off the face of the earth. Now that the terrible thing which had just happened had broken down and done away with every thought of those trivial enmities that fed on such unworthy motives as desire for riches, our common danger bound us, in spite of every antagonism, closer together than brothers. By some strange power that cry which had come back to us when Seth Upham's song ended not only enforced a truce between our two parties, but so brought out the naked sincerity of each one of us, that we knew, each and all, without a spoken word, that for the time being we could trust one another.
Gleazen, always reckless, was the first to break the silence. From the wall he took down a pewter mug, which the dead man they called Bull had hung there. Pretending to pour into it wine from an imaginary bottle, he looked across it at Arnold.
"This is not the vintage I should choose for my toast," he said with a wry mouth, "but it must serve. Yes, Lamont, it must serve." He raised the mug high. "In half an hour we'll be six dead men. I drink—to the next one to go."
Arnold coolly smiled. Pretending to raise a glass and clink it against the mug, he, too, went through the pantomime of drinking.
I was not surprised that Abe Guptil was staring at them, his lips parted, or that his face was pale. Although drunk only in make-believe, it was a toast to make a man think twice. I drew a deep breath; I could only admire the coolness of the two.
Yet now and then there flashed in Arnold's eye a hint of resourceful determination such as Gleazen probably never dreamed of, a hint of scorn for such theatrical trickery.
We were all on our feet now, standing together in our silent truce, when we heard for the last time that sound, so unhappily familiar, the long-drawn wailing cry that, whenever the wizard spoke, had preceded and followed his harangue. Coming from the dark forest beyond the clearing, it brought home to us more vividly than ever the ominous silence that had ensued since Seth Upham fell by the spring. Then that familiar, accursed voice, faint but penetrating, came from the wall of vines:—