Van Dorn, agile as a panther, sprang on Milman's back and looked into a window in the gable, drawing his face away, so as to be unseen in the night.
The bright interior was full of people, sitting back against the wainscoting, as if listening to a sermon, while down the middle of the stately hall stretched a table lighted by whale-oil lamps and many little candles, and filled with the remnants of a feast. The stairway in the corner Van Dorn could not see, and there the dusky audience was all facing, as if towards the preacher. There seemed a something out of the common in the kind of attention the inmates were paying, but Van Dorn's eyes were absorbed in the sight of several drooping and yet almost startled dove-eyed quadroon maids, and he only noticed that the spy, Ransom, could not be seen.
"Sorden," Van Dorn said, slipping down, "can Ransom have betrayed us? Chis! they all look as if a death-warrant was being read."
"My skin! No, Captain. Air they all there?"
"All," said Van Dorn; "I see thirty thousand dollars of flesh in sight."
"And niggers won't scrimmage nohow," spoke Whitecar. "Let's beat 'em mos' to death."
"Come on then," said Van Dorn, softly; "if the windows are not lifted, break them in."
He twisted, by main strength, a panel out of the palings near the house, and led the way to the great front door. A dozen desperate hands seized the heavy panel and ran with it. The door flew open, but at that moment every light in Cowgill House went out.
"Dar's ghosts in dar," the hoarse voice of Derrick Molleston was heard to say, and the negro element stopped and shrank.
"Tindel, your torch!" Van Dorn exclaimed, and, after a moment's delay—the old house and shady yard meantime illumined by lightning, and sounds of thunder rolling in the sky—a blazing pine-knot, all prepared, was procured, and Van Dorn, holding it in his left hand, and with nothing but his rude whip in his right, bounded in the door, shouting: