"Hist, there! Can that noise! Do you want to raise hell here? Wake up, Sam! Get onto your job. Hennie's comin'."
"That's all right, Joe! Dry up! This is good Sunday School dope! This won't rouse no suspicions. Go to the devil and mind your business! I know what I'm about!"
Shirley was almost ready to cry, but she drew a deep breath and started on another song:
Jesus, Lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high!
Hide me, oh, my Saviour hide,
Till the storm of life is past.
On through the time-worn words she sang, while the sin-hardened man stood silently and listened. His eyes had gradually lost their leer and grown soft and tender, as if some childhood memories of home and mother and a time when he was innocent and good were looking out his eyes, reminding him of what he once intended to be before he ate the apple of wisdom and became as the gods and devils. Shirley gradually became aware that she was holding her strange audience; and a power beyond herself steadied her voice, and kept her fingers from trembling on the old pearl keys, as she wandered on from song to song; perhaps happening on the very ones,—who knows?—that this man, standing in the dying twilight of the old gloomy house, had sung beside his mother's hearth or in church during his childhood? Certain it is that he stood there silent and listened for at least half an hour without an interruption, while the light in the big room grew dimmer and dimmer and all about the house seemed still as death in the intervals between her voice. She was just beginning:
Abide with me,
Fast falls the eventide,
The darkness deepens,
Lord, with me abide!
When the man put his hand in his pocket and brought out a candle. Scratching a match on his trousers, he lit the candle and set it carefully on the piano, where its light fell flickering, wavering over her worn young face; and who shall say that she was not a messenger from another world to this man who had long trodden the downward path?
They were interrupted, however, before this song was finished by a newcomer who entered like a shadow and stood at the end of the piano looking wonderingly from Shirley to the man, when she glanced up. She stopped, startled, for although he wore no brass buttons nor blue clothes she was quite sure those were the same gray eyes that had looked at her from the recess of the window in the Government office that afternoon, perhaps the same boy who had come after her car and sent her off on this long way into the wilderness.
The man Sam straightened up suddenly and looked about him half-ashamed with an apologetic grin:
"Oh, you've come, have you, Hennie? Well, you been a long time about it! But now I guess we'll get to work. Where's Joe? Out on the watch? All right then, Miss, if you've no objection, we'll just take a little vacation on the psalm singin' and turn our attention to worldly things. I calculate you're sharp enough to know what we brought you put here for? I acknowledge you can sing real well, and you sorta got my goat for a while there with all that mourning bench tra-la, for you certainly have got that holy dope down fine; but now the time's come for business, and you needn't to think that because I can enjoy a little sentiment now and then in a leisure moment that you can put anything over on me, for it can't be did! I mean business and I've got you in my power! We're ten miles from any settlement, and no neighbors anywhere's about. Everybody moved away. So it won't do any good to work any funny business on us. You can't get away. We're all armed, and no one knows where you are! If you behave yourself and do as you're told there won't be any trouble. We'll just transact our business and then we'll have a bit of supper, and mebbe a few more tunes—got any rag-time in your repitwar?—and then sometime after midnight, when the moon's good and dark, we'll get you back to civilization where you won't have no trouble in gettin' home. But if you act up and get funny, why you know what to expect. There was a young girl murdered once in this house and buried in the cellar and ever since folks say it's hanted and they won't come near it. That's the kind of a place we're in! So, now are you ready?"