In an hour or so they began to draw out of the lowlands fructifying in the sunlight, and in among the craggy foothills. Here the knobs stood up, like the knuckle-bones of a great rough hand laid across the peaceful countryside. “Deadenings” flashed by, with the girdled, bleached tree-trunks rising, deformed and gaunt, above the young corn. The purplish pink of the redbud trees was thick in clumps on the hillsides. The train entered a cut with a steep fill running down on one side and a seamed cliff standing close up on the other. Small saplings grew out of the crannies in the rocks and swung their boughs downward so that the leaves almost brushed the dusty tops of the coaches sliding by beneath them.
Suddenly, midway of this cut, there came a grinding and sliding of the wheels—the cars began creaking in all their joints as though they would rack apart; and, with a jerk which wakened Judge Priest and shook the others in their seats, the train halted. From up ahead somewhere, heard dimly through the escape of the freed steam, came a confusion of shouted cries. Could they be nearing the Junction so soon? Mrs. McLaurin felt in a new handbag—of gray broadcloth with a gold clasp, to match her uniform—for a powder-rag. Then she shrank cowering back in her place, for leaping briskly up the car steps there appeared, framed in the open doorway just beyond her, an armed man—a short, broad man in a flannel shirt and ragged overalls, with a dirty white handkerchief bound closely over the bridge of his nose and shielding the lower part of his face. A long-barreled pistol was in his right hand and a pair of darting, evilly disposed eyes looked into her startled ones from under the brim of a broken hat.
“Hands up, everybody!” he called out, and swung his gun right and left from his hip, so that its muzzle seemed to point all ways at once. “Hands up, everybody—and keep 'em up!”
Behind this man, back to back with him, was the figure of another man, somewhat taller, holding similar armed dominion over the astounded occupants of the day-coach. This much, and this much only, in a flash of time was seen by Uncle Zach Matthews and Judge Priest's Jeff, as, animated by a joint instantaneous impulse, they slid off their seat at the other end of the car and lay embraced on the floor, occupying a space you would not have believed could have contained one darky—let alone two. And it was seen more fully and at greater length by the gray veterans as their arms with one accord rose stiffly above the level of their heads; and also it was seen by the young matron, the sponsor and the maid of honor, as they huddled together, clinging to one another desperately for the poor comfort of close contact. Little Rita Covington, white and still, looked up with blazing gray eyes into the face of the short man with the pistol. She had the palms of both her hands pressed tightly against her ears. Rita was brave enough—but she hated the sound of firearms. Where she half knelt, half crouched, she was almost under the elbow of the intruder.
The whole thing was incredible—it was impossible! Train robberies had passed out of fashion years and years before. Here was this drowsing, quiet country lying just outside the windows, and the populous Junction only a handful of miles away; but, incredible or not, there stood the armed trampish menace in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder with an accomplice. And from outside and beyond there came added evidence to the unbelievable truth of it in the shape of hoarse, unintelligible commands rising above a mingling of pointless outcries and screams.
“Is this a joke, sir, or what?” demanded Major Covington, choking with an anger born of his own helplessness and the undignifiedness of his attitude.
“Old gent, if you think it's a joke jest let me ketch you lowerin' them arms of yourn,” answered back the yeggman. His words sounded husky, coming muffled through the handkerchief; but there was a grim threat in them, and for just a breathless instant the pistol-barrel stopped wavering and centered dead upon the major's white-vested breast.
“Set right still, major,” counseled Judge Priest at his side, not firing his eyes off the muffled face. “He's got the drop on us.”
“But to surrender without a blow—and we all old soldiers too!” lamented Major Covington, yet making no move to lower his arms.
“I know—but set still,” warned Judge Priest, his puckered glance taking toll sideways of his fellow travelers—all of them with chagrin, amazement and indignation writ large upon their faces, and all with arms up and palms opened outward like a calisthenic class of elderly gray beards frozen stiff and solid in the midst of some lung-expanding exercise. Any other time the picture would have been funny; but now it wasn't. And the hold-up man was giving his further orders.