The cockloft above his room, which was reached by a ladder, had windows which were really only loopholes and from there he could better see into the tangle that sheltered his enemies.
He entertained no vain hope of rescue. He asked for no deliverance. The story drew to its ending and he meant to cap it with the one climax to which the last half hour had left anything of significance. Since small things become vastly portentous when written into the margin between life and death, he hoped that before he died he might recognize the face of at least one of the men whom he meant to take with him across the River of Eternity.
So, dedicating himself to that motive, he climbed the ladder.
Peering out through first one and then the other of the loopholes of the cockloft, he waited, and it seemed to him that he waited eternally. He began to fear that his self-sure attackers would content themselves 180 with an inactive vigil and that after all he was to be cheated.
The sun was westering. The shadows were elongating. The sounds through the woods were subtly changing from the voices of day to those of approaching night.
Still he waited.
Outside also they were waiting; waiting to make sure that it was safe to go in and confirm their presumption that he had fallen.
But when Spurrier had, in a little time as the watch recorded it, served out his purgatorial sentence, he sensed a stir in the massed banks of the laurel and thrust his rifle barrel outward in preparation for welcome. A moment afterward he saw a hat with a downturned brim—a coat with an upturned collar—a pair of shoulders that hunched slowly forward with almost imperceptible movement. His mind had become a calculating machine now, functioning with deliberate surety.
The unrecognizable figure out there was a hundred yards away and the rifle he held would bore through the head under the hat crown at that range as a gimlet bores through a marked spot on soft pine.
But a single shot would end the show. No one else would appear and even the dead man would be hauled back by his heels—unidentified. He would wait until he could make his bag of game more worth dying for—more worth her dying for!