The man with the buckskin shirt was sitting on the sill of the farther window, swinging his feet. He began to whistle. The girl stopped in her walk, as if she had been struck. She looked at him with something in her face that was equal to a man’s worst oath. Then, “oh, hush!” she said. “Hush!”
The fellow stared at her in astonishment, but he ceased to whistle. She stood. For a minute or two there was no sound in the room except the bubbling of a foul pipe, no sound outside but the wailing cry of a waterfowl. It was the mallard’s cry that she had heard, perhaps; for presently she resumed her walk, Levi still watching her with a crafty eye. If she was listening he was thinking, and it was then for the first time that it struck me with something of a shock that he was not the man to let me go—however Wilmer might fare. A bad thought that, to intrude at this time!
One of the horses pawed restlessly in the room below, and the man who had gone down to feed them, shouted a question from the foot of the ladder. Levi answered him. The interruption this caused brought the same look of impatience, of endurance, of sheer suffering to the girl’s face. She stood, she turned to me; for the first time, as if she could no longer control herself, she spoke to me openly. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Half past ten,” I said. “I fear that you cannot expect news yet.” I was moved indeed, moved to the heart with pity for her; and pained, in the midst of my own anxiety, to think that she should pass intolerable hours in expecting what could not come yet—and in my view would not come at all. By and by things would be better. The sun would suck up the vapors, we should breathe more freely, we should be able to look abroad, we should see something if it were but the sun-lit marshes. As it was, the grizzly room, the choking fog, the men, the suspense, set the worst face on everything and filled me with loathing.
Presently a flight of birds passed the house with a whirring of wings and a single note of alarm. The man at the window leant out to follow them with his eye. He muttered something about a gun, and again there was silence, while Constantia resumed her restless march, and Levi followed her with his eyes.
A long, long quarter of an hour followed, and then the silence was broken. Out of the fog came a faint whooping cry, distant and tremulous. The girl was the first to hear it and she stood, as if turned to stone. I saw her stiffen, I saw her eyes dilate, her lips grow white. Her gaze met mine in an agony of questioning. For a moment she ceased to breathe, so intently she listened. Then the cry rose again, still distant but louder. She turned to the trap-door, as if to go down.
But her limbs failed her—at any rate Levi was before her. I suppose he had studied her as closely as I had. He bounded to the head of the ladder, and slipped down it, calling out to her that he would see what it was, calling out to the remaining man to look to me. The girl, thus forestalled, turned from the ladder, and went to the window. She leant on the sill, and I saw that she was shaking from head to foot. “It is Tom!” she murmured.
“Tom!” I exclaimed.
“Yes! Tom!” she said, her breath coming in sobs. “He has news. Oh, God in His mercy grant that it be good news!”
We saw Levi and two of the men run from the house, and vanish in the fog that hid the road. We heard the cry once more—it was near at hand now—but there followed on it a confused outcry, a thudding of feet, a shot—the flame of which for an instant rent the mist—a struggle. The girl sank against me, and if I had not put my arm round her and supported her, she would have fallen. “It was Tom!” she gasped. “It was Tom!”