Then he turned to the others. “I was ’most forgetting the fellow outside there. We’ll hold them off from the window while you bring him in.”
It appeared horribly risky, but Torrance spoke with a curious unconcernedness, and Clavering laughed as, signing to two men, he prepared to do his bidding. There was a creaking and rattling, and the great door at one end of the hall swung open, and Flora Schuyler, staring at the darkness, expected to see a rush of shadowy figures out of it. But she saw only the blurred outline of two men who stooped and dragged something in, and then the door swung to again.
They lifted their burden higher. Torrance, approaching the table, took up the lamp, and Miss Schuyler had a passing glimpse of a hanging head and a drawn grey face as they tramped past her heavily. She opened her blue lips and closed them again, for she was dazed with cold, and the cry that would have been a relief to her never came. It was several minutes later when Torrance’s voice rose from by the stove.
“We’ll leave him here in the meanwhile, where he can’t freeze,” he said. “Shot right through the shoulder, but there’s no great bleeding. The cold would stop it.”
Hetty was at her father’s side the next moment. “Flo,” she said, “we have to do something now.”
Torrance waved them back. “The longer that man stops as he is, the better chances he’s going to have.” He glanced towards the window. “Boys, can you see what they’re doing now?”
“Hauling out prairie hay,” said Clavering. “They’ve broken into the store, and from what one fellow shouted they’ve found the kerosene.”
Torrance said nothing whatever, and his silence was significant. Listening with strained attention, Flora Schuyler could hear a faint hum of voices, and now and then vague sounds amidst a patter of hurrying steps. They told her very little, but the tension in the attitude of the half-seen men had its meaning. It was evident that their assailants purposed to burn them out.
Ten minutes passed, as it were interminably, and still nobody moved. The voices had grown a little louder, and there was a rattle as though men unseen behind the buildings were dragging up a wagon. Suddenly a rhythmic drumming came softly through it, and Clavering glanced at Torrance.
“Somebody riding this way at a gallop,” he said.