He looked down again at his hand and Hugh noticed that over the back of it ran a long puckered scar that extended upward under his sleeve.
“That was the time when I lost count of Sunday,” Oscar went on. “It was before I had been here very long and Jake and his friends were bound to run me out. You see I am proving up on a claim to this land; I have to live here just so long, build a house and keep up a certain amount of cultivation. They thought that if they could drive me away and burn down the cottage they could jump the claim. They know better now.”
“Was it—was it hard to teach them better?” Hugh inquired eagerly.
“It took me three days, no, four or five, I never quite knew. They lay in the woods at the edge of the clearing and shot whenever I came near the door or window. See there,” he laid his finger upon a rough groove that showed in the window ledge, “that is some of their work and there are more marks around the door and even inside. Little Hendrik—that was the dog—and I stood the siege for two days; he was a great help, for he waked me twice in the night when I had dropped asleep and the Indians were stealing across the clearing. We stood them off easily enough for a while, but it got to be bad when our water gave out.”
Oscar told the story as calmly as though it concerned some one quite other than himself. He would indeed have dropped the narrative there had Hugh not urged him on with impatient questions.
“Yes, by the third day we were badly off. So when it was twilight I let little Hendrik out to go down to the spring and drink. Would you think it mattered to them whether a little black dog lived or not? They knew that I—I liked him a good deal, I suppose, for they killed him halfway across the clearing. I heard a shot and a yelp and ran out to him, but when I got there he was dead.”
“You ran out? Didn’t they shoot at you?” Hugh exclaimed.
“Yes, and hit me too, but I didn’t even notice it at the time. I carried little Hendrik back, and if I was determined to hold out before, I was a hundred times more determined then. It rained that night and I caught a little water in a bucket by the window, so I had that to go on, but I never really knew quite how long the fight lasted. The bullet had plowed across the back of my hand and along my arm and had broken the bone just above the elbow. It got very sore and made me lightheaded, so for a while it seemed to be always glaring daytime and for a while always night. And then I seemed to wake up from a long sleep and found the sun just coming up and a fresh wind blowing off the lake and the pirates gone. The clock had run down and I had lost the place on the calendar and that was how I got Sunday three days wrong.”
“And Jake and the Indians, did they all get away?”
“There were seven that came, and it seemed to me that I could still count seven afterward where I saw them walking around their cabin over there. But I heard when I went to Rudolm that there was not a sound man amongst them, and that two of them had got enough of pirating forever and did not come back to these parts. And while it is pretty hard to see for certain, I believe Jake limps still.”