By this time some inkling of the trouble had been borne to Collabone, ever an early riser. As he came hastily forth from his quarters, the first thing he saw was the drooping form of Mrs. Winn, weeping at the colonel's gate. Seizing her arm with scant ceremony, he whirled her about and bore her homeward, she sobbing out her story as they sped along, he listening with clouded, anxious face.
"Go back to your room, Mrs. Winn," he said, so solemnly and warningly she could not but heed. "Go to your baby. I'll go first next door, then I'll find your husband." She shrank within the hallway, and threw herself, weeping miserably, upon the sofa in the pretty parlor,—the parlor where she had so fascinated Hodge. There the sound of her baby's wailing reached her in an interval of her own, and she called to the nurse to do something to comfort that child. There was no answer. "Miss Purdy," with clattering tongue and eager eyes and ears and half a dozen sympathizing neighbors, was out in rear of the house, deaf to demands of either mother or child; there Collabone found her, and sent her scurrying within before the fury of his wrath.
"Now, this will not do, Mrs. Winn," he said, as, following, he lifted the moaning woman from the sofa. "You must go to your room,—to your child, as I told you. Captain Barclay will soon be all right. He has lost much blood, but the hemorrhage is checked. Now I will go for Mr. Winn. It's a bad business, but don't make it worse by any more—nonsense." With that he not too gently pushed her up the first few stairs, then turned abruptly and hastened away to Frazier's.
In the hall he found that gray-haired, gray-faced veteran listening stupidly to Winn.
"I don't understand, sir," he was saying. "You struck him—with what?"
"I don't know," said Winn. "They say I've killed him. I have come to surrender myself." His eyes were as dull and leaden as his heart.
"It's not so bad," burst in the doctor. "Barclay fell or was knocked over a chair, and the jar reopened his wound. He fainted from loss of blood, but it's checked now."
"But—how?—why?" the colonel was stammering. Over the balustrade aloft popped one head night-capped, and two with touseled hair, and blanched faces were framed in all three, and gasping words were heard, and whisperings as of awe-stricken, news-craving souls. "Where did this occur, and when did you return, sir?"
"On the back porch of my—of our quarters, colonel,—when I got back, just before gun-fire."
"And what possible excuse or explanation have you, sir? What could warrant such—such conduct?" demanded Frazier, as though at a loss for suitable words. Yet, even as he asked, his wife's predictions reasserted themselves, and he glanced uneasily aloft.