“Whar it oughter be,” he groaned; “on the trigger o’ my carbine.”
His grief was not only that his arm was gone. It was to recognize the fact that his heart no longer beat exultantly at the mere prospect of conflict. And he was anguished with the poignant despair of a helpless man who has once been foremost in the fight.
The next day he was moody and morose, and brooded silently over the fire. The doors were closed, for winter had come at last. The hoar frost whitened the great gaunt limbs of the trees, and lay in every curled dead leaf on the ground, and followed the zigzag lines of the fence, and embossed the fodder stack and the ash-hopper and the roofs with fantastic incongruities in silver tracery.
The sun did not shine, the clouds dropped lower and lower still, a wind sprung up, and presently the snow was flying.
The widow esteemed this as in the nature of a special providence, since the dizzying whirl of white flakes veiled the little cabin and its humble surroundings from the observation of the free-booting tenants of the old hotel across the gorge. “It air powerful selfish, I know, ter hope the bushwhackers will forage on somebody else’s poultry an’ sech, but somehows my own chickens seem nigher kin ter me than other folkses’ be. I never see no sech ten-toed chickens ez mine nowhar.”
Reflecting further upon the peculiar merits of these chickens, ten-toed, being Dorking, reinforced by the claims of consanguinity, she presently evolved as a precautionary measure a scheme of concealing them in the “roof-room” of the cabin. And from time to time, as the silent day wore on, like the blast of a bugle the crow of a certain irrepressible young rooster demonstrated how precarious was his retirement in the loft.
“Hear the insurance o’ that thar fowel!” she would exclaim in exasperation. “S’pose’n the bushwhackers war hyar now, axin fur poultry, an’ I war a-tellin’ ’em, ez smilin’ an’ mealy-mouthed ez I could, that we hain’t got no fowels! That thar reckless critter would be in the fryin’-pan ’fore night. They’ll l’arn ye ter hold yer jaw, I’ll be bound!”
But the bushwhackers did not come, and the next day the veil of the falling snow still interposed, and the familiar mountains near at hand, and the long reaches of the unexplored perspective were all obscured; the drifts deepened, and the fence seemed dwarfed half covered as it was, and the boles of the trees hard by were burlier, bereft of their accustomed height. The storm ceased late one afternoon; over the white earth was a somber gray sky, but all along the horizon above the snowy summits of the western mountains a slender scarlet line betokened a fair morrow.
Hilary, in the weariness of inaction, had taken note of the weather, and with his hat drawn down over his brow he strolled out to the verge of the precipice.