He dared neither knock on the door nor scratch on the pane, but he remembered the signal that had been Bear Cat Stacy's. He had heard the boy give it, and now he cautiously repeated, three times, the softly quavering call of the barn-owl.
It was a moonless night, but the stars were frostily clear and as the refugee crouched, dissolved in shadow, against the mortised logs of the cabin's corner, the door opened and Blossom stood, slim and straight, against the yellow background of the lamp-lit door.
She might have seemed, to one passing, interested only in the star-filled skies and the starkly etched peaks, but in a low voice of extreme guardedness she demanded, "Bear Cat, where air ye?"
Henderson remembered that Turner, too, was "hiding out" and that this girl had the ingrained self-repression of a people inured to the perils of ambuscade. Without leaving the cancellation of the shadowed wall he spoke with a caution that equaled her own.
"Don't seem to hear me ... just keep looking straight ahead.... It's not Bear Cat.... It's Henderson ... and they are after me.... So far I've escaped ... but I reckon they're following." He had seen the impulsive start with which she heard his announcement and the instant recovery with which she relaxed her attitude into one of less tell-tale significance. "Thank God," breathed the pursued man, "for that self-control!"
He detected a heart-wrenching anxiety in her voice, which belied the picture she made of unruffled simplicity as she commanded in a tense whisper, "Go on, I'm hearkenin'."
"Go back into the house," he directed evenly. "Close the window shutters ... then open the back door...."
She did not obey with the haste of excitement. She was too wise for that, but paused unhurriedly, humming an ancient ballade, as though the stresses of life had no meaning for her, before she drew back and closed the door.
Reappearing, at the window, she repeated the same convincing assumption of untroubled indolence as she drew in the heavy shutters; but a moment later she stood shaken and blanched of cheek at the rear door. "Come in hastily," she pleaded. "Air ye hurted?"
Slipping through the aperture, Henderson smiled at her. His heart had leaped wildly as he read the terror of her eyes: a terror for his danger.