Then, while they stood tensed of muscle and blazing of eye, old McAllister Falkins stepped between the ringleaders, and held up his arms. At his side stood his son Henry, and on the quiet of indrawn and tight-held breaths the elder's words broke with almost as staccato a sharpness as that which would have come from the lips of the guns.
CHAPTER XIII
For years no man had heard McAllister Falkins speak except in the smooth and cultivated parlance of the lowlands. In Congress he had been accounted silver-tongued, yet now, by some stress of excitement, when the white-haired patriarch lifted up his voice, words came tumbling from his lips, not in measured phrases but in the crude cascading force of vernacular.
Henry Falkins had felt instinctively that the greater danger for his father lay toward the guns of the Spooners, since it was hardly likely, even in so impassioned a crisis, that a Falkins rifle would turn on a Falkins breast. Acting in response to that belief, he had stepped between the old man and Red Newton, and the two men stood back to back, while the tableau held, each of them unarmed.
And as old McAllister raised his clenched hands and roared out in a voice that carried, "Stop hit, ye damn' fools!" he found his snapping eyes gazing into a pair that looked down into his own, though he stood an even six feet in his socks. The eyes of the protagonist were not snapping like his own, but smoldering dangerously with hatred and resolve. The entire face was black and rigid, from its unkempt locks of jet to its high outstanding cheekbones and clamped under jaw. The right hand that had raised the pistol still held it, but instead of pressing it to the breast of his enemy, young Jake now found it trained on the venerated man whom he must not injure, and with slow unwillingness the muzzle drooped.
"What deviltry air this?" thundered McAllister Falkins, addressing himself to the young ringleader. "What hes happened to the breed of Falkinses thet a man what gave his hand in contract breaks his bond? Air the Falkinses turned liars and pledge-busters?"
"Why hain't ye a-talkin' ter them other fellers, too?" demanded young Jake with that nasal shrillness which excitement brings to the mountain tongue. "Does ye see any more guns over hyar then amongst them murderers?"
At the epithet, a murmur ran ominously along the opposite side of the path, but there were men there to quiet it at the raising of Henry Falkins' hand; men representing the Deacon, whose influence, though unseen, was powerful enough to hold his people leashed.
"Never mind why I don't talk to them." The resonant voice of Old Mack rang like a bell, and, now that the first death-freighted instant had passed, he spoke again without dialect. "I'm talking to you now. You-all gave me your pledge that you would hear me out without a breach of peace. You tried to break that pledge. You drew first. I saw you. I am talking to you now, and I speak as the oldest man in the county who bears the name of Falkins. I speak as the man who has the right, if he chooses, to be the head of the Falkins family, and I am talking to you who are a young cub of a boy and whose name is not even Falkins—and by God, sir, I mean to be listened to!"