But now his curiosity was aroused. Possibly Glory meant to stay the night at Aunt Erie’s and had sent him her announcement in this form. He went for grain and scattered it, and after repeated efforts succeeded in capturing the messenger.
But when he loosened the paper and read it his face went abruptly white and from his lips escaped an excited “Great God!”
He thrust the note into the preacher’s hand and rushed indoors, emerging after a few minutes with eyes wildly lit and a rifle in his hands. Bud Hawkins understood, for he had read in the interval the scribbled words:
Stopped at Jack Spurrier’s house. It’s surrounded. Men are shooting at us on all sides.
Dyke Cappeze was the one man to whom Spurrier had confided both the circumstances of his mysterious waylaying and the matter of the rattlesnakes and now 186 the father was not discounting the peril into which his daughter had strayed.
“I’m going on ahead, Brother Hawkins,” he announced. “I want you to send out a general alarm and to follow me with all the armed men you can round up.” There he halted in momentary bewilderment. In that sparsely peopled territory the hurried mustering of an adequate force on such short order was in itself almost an impossibility. There were no means of communication. Abruptly, the old lawyer wheeled and pointed a thin and quivering index finger toward his beloved barn.
“There’s just one way,” he declared with stoical directness. “All my neighbors will come to fight a fire. I’ve got to set my own barn to get them here!”
Five minutes later the structure sent up its black massed summons of smoke, shot with vermilion, as the shingles snapped and showed glowingly against the black background of vapor, even in the brightness of the afternoon.
Dyke Cappeze himself was on his way, and the preacher remaining behind was meeting and dispatching each hurried arrival. As he did so his voice leaped as it sometimes leaped in the zealot’s fervor of exhortation, and he sent the men out into the fight with rifle and shotgun as trenchantly as he expounded peace from the pulpit.
When a dozen men had ridden away, scattering gravel from galloping hoofs, he rode behind the saddle cantle of the last, for it was not his doctrine to hold his hand when he sent others into battle. Also he might be needed there as a minister, a doctor, or both.