“Clear for me after you’re dead!” she exclaimed. “Hev ye got two guns? We’ll both go out alive or else neither one of us.”
Then suddenly she drew away from him, and he saw her hurriedly scribbling on a scrap of paper. Outside it was quiet again.
Glory folded the small sheet and took the pigeon from its basket and then, for the first time, Spurrier, who had forgotten the bird, divined her intent.
He was busying himself with laying out cartridges, and preparing for a siege, and when he looked up again she stood with the bird against her cheek, just as she had held the dead quail on that first day.
But before he could interfere she had drawn near the window and he saw that to reach the broken pane 175 and liberate the pigeon she must, for a moment, stand exposed.
He leaped for her with a shout of warning, but she had straightened and thrust the bird out, and then to the accompaniment of a horrible uproar of musketry that drowned his own outcry he saw her fall back.
Spurrier was instantly on his knees lifting the drooping head, and as her lids flickered down she whispered with a pallid smile:
“The bird’s free. He’ll carry word home—if ye kin jest hold ’em back fer a spell and——”