Simple enough when one understood, he pondered, staring at the closed door. But what explanation lay just here; this girl could not have been born when Johnny’s Luck flourished; whence had she come, and why?
It was broad morning, the sun rising clear above the last of the trees so that its light fell upon the two beds of red flowers. On the doorstep lay the bearskin as he had left it. From the rock and dirt chimney smoke rose. Coming closer to the house he heard now and then a sound of one walking within. He fancied that he heard a voice, hardly more than a whisper.
His purpose taken, he stood watching, waiting. If he had to stay here until some one came out, if he were forced to linger here all day, camp here to-night, he was not going away until the last question was answered.
“I’d be a brute to go off and leave her alone here,” he told himself stubbornly. “Or, perhaps, worse than alone. The poor little devil won’t know how to take care of herself; God knows what she’s up against as it is. Anyway, here I stay!”
The windows remained shuttered; the door stood unopened; the smoke from the chimney grew a faint gray line against the sky and was gone; it was death-still in the house. An hour passed and Sheldon, striding back and forth, on the watch for a possible attempt to slip away through a door which he had found at the rear, grew impatient.
Another hour, and never a sound. Such watching and waiting, with nothing discovered to reward his patience, was the death of what little patience was a part of John Sheldon’s makeup.
“I’ve waited long enough,” he muttered.
He strode straight between the beds of red flowers, up the three steps made of logs, and rapped at the door. The sounds died away, as all sounds seemed to do here, swallowed by the silence, echoless, as though killed by thick walls. So he knocked again, calling out:
“I’ve no habit of prying into other peoples’s business, but I am not used to being treated like a leper, either. Open the door or I shall batter it down.”
Hurried whispers within, then silence. He waited for a moment. Then swinging back his rifle he drove the butt mightily against the door, close to the latch. There was a little cry then, Paula’s voice he was sure, a cry of pure fear.