"Damn yo'—I'll take yo' up," agreed Orlick thickly.
While these two helpless belligerents lay in the moonlight, slowly bleeding to death and scowling at each other, Johnse, at length, laid his fingers on a twig which he broke into two parts, attended with infinite pain. Then where his hand lay he clawed up more dirt into a minute mound. Into this he stuck the long stick and beside it the short one. Then he pulled them out again and hissed a scathing reprimand at Orlick.
"Yore a lookin'—traitor——!"
Orlick slowly averted his face.
A brief silence ensued, broken only by the roar of the river and the wheezing of their breaths. Again Johnse stammered:
"Now draw—draw now, coward—take yore pick—heer me?—draw——"
Over in the road a roving hound squatted his gaunt shape, and lifting his muzzle up to the moon, howled long and piteously.
In the meantime Buddy Lutts had dodged along, avoiding the road until he reached a narrow plot of underbrush that separated him from the first row of frame houses. Here he lay and watched for a chance to proceed along the road. He could not see the road directly beneath him, but through an aperture he held a diagonal view of the highway for a distance of some fifty yards.
Like projections of a cinematograph, he saw the forms of men flitting past this moonlit gap, running toward town. But he could not distinguish the pursued from the pursuers. He also saw some horses gallop past with empty saddles. One of these derelicts stopped short, framed in the light of the gap, and turned to cropping at the roadside with reins dragging about his hoofs. Far behind him the noise of the conflict echoed back in desultory, straggling shots. These reports emanated also from a remote quarter of the tobacco field opposite where Buddy lay, and from the direction of the Courthouse.
The boy instinctively knew that the real battle was over; he knew that his people had crushed and annihilated the main body of the McGill forces in less than ten minutes, at the gate of the fated graveyard. He furthermore knew that the tail of this fight was backing toward the town, where it would quiver and stir, and would not die until sunrise. It had dwindled down to a "bush-whacking" contest. It was now a nocturnal game of hide-and-seek, with death lurking in the shadows and behind every object that offered refuge.