She looked at him for some moments. “Go further up the line,” she said, “the third hut from here is empty. Pass in there and have no fear.”
She closed her own door in his face, and Sard did as he was bid. The third hut from hers was empty. He went into it. At some early time there had been a mud wall across the hut, dividing it into two. This had fallen into a pile of loose earth. Sard got behind this pile and thought, “Well, here I am; and if that woman lifts a finger, my throat will be cut on this doorstep, and that little beast, Chaco, will lick my blood.”
He waited; each minute seemed an hour. At the end hut of the village the man still sang to his mandoline, in his falsetto voice, a poem of intolerable length and folly, which Sard recognised as a rhymed romance of the early 17th century. Footsteps passed up and down outside the door. Once three men came to the door and stopped there, muttering in low voices for two or three minutes. They were smoking cigarettes and spitting. One of the men was carrying harness, which clinked.
One of them said, “Well, sooner or later that’s what it’ll have to come to.”
And another said, “We can count on you then?”
The other replied, “Well, come here, come on inside here; I’ll just give you my reasons.”
He had his hand on the door-latch and the door eight inches ajar, when the other said, “No, not in there, thank you. There are tarantulas in there. Come on up along.”
They moved away. Then for a long time Sard sat there, thinking of what they had said: “There are tarantulas in there.” He heard a queer, regular, clicking noise in one of the corners, two or three yards from him. It was a little dry, slight clicking noise, rather like two wooden skewers being tapped together. Some one had told him, years before, that tarantulas click their mandibles together before they attack. “That’s what it is,” he thought, “it’s a tarantula in the corner.”
He kept himself breathlessly still, and then suddenly he heard a little light pattering. There was a swift, flurrying scutter along the floor, a shrill squeal, something leapt and fell across his feet and writhed away squealing. He heard the thing, whatever it was, rat or mouse, trying to shake itself free in the corner of the room. The squeals soon died to a whimper and the whimper to a sigh, as the tarantula in the darkness sucked his fill. Sard presently heard the corpse sink down, as the insect moved away. He waited with his feet drawn up under him and his hands covering his throat, lest the insect should want more blood and come to him for it.
The time went slowly by, the man with the mandoline ceased his song, somebody who wished to sleep cursed a howling dog until it came indoors. But the wolves out on the mountains crept nearer. From time to time one would cry his cry. Whenever this happened, the dogs in the huts whimpered and were uneasy. Everybody, by this time, had gone to rest in that village of outlaws. Sard thought that it could not be long before the woman redeemed her promise.