"BLOOD!"
Limber Tim all this time had held his back against the wall as firmly as if it was about to fall on all their heads, and their lives depended on his strength. His mouth had been wide open with wonder. He had not understood at all from the first, but now he was more than bewildered—he was terrified.
Blood! blood! He unscrewed himself from the wall, went, winding his long limber legs up the trail, past the Howling Wilderness, after the silent but excited women, and all the time this awful sentence of Bunker Hill's was shooting through his brain—"Blood! blood! it is! Will you believe me now?"
He reached his post by the pine fence, and, being no wiser than before, he again wound himself up against the palings, and reached back his arms and wove them through the pickets, and stood there on one leg looking over his shoulder as the two women disappeared into the Widow's cabin.
Dawn comes slowly down in these dark, deep, wooded cañons of the Sierras. Morning seems to be battling with the night. Night is entrenched in the woods, and retreats only by inches—the Battle of the Wilderness.
In the steel-gray dawn, cold and sharp, Limber Tim heard a cry that knocked him loose from the fence. He picked himself together, and again twisted himself into the pickets; but all the time he kept seeing Bunker Hill pushing back her sleeve, holding up her arm in the ghostly light of the pine-log fire, and saying, "Blood it is! Will you believe me now?"
"Blood," mused the man. "Somebody's hurt. Somebody's hurt awful bad, too, or they wouldn't keep a feller a-standin' agin a fence the whole blessed night."
The man's teeth began to chatter. The thought of blood and the bleak cold morning kept them smiting together as if he had had an ague.
A man in great gum boots came screeching by the cabin; his nose was pointed straight for the Howling Wilderness, but backing against Limber Tim as he hung up against the fence, stopped, and asked timidly and very respectfully of the Widow.
Limber held his head thoughtfully to one side, as if he was trying to balance the important facts in his mind, and reveal only just so much of the condition of the Widow, or Sandy, or Bunker Hill, or whoever it was that was hurt, as was best, and no more, but for a time was silent.