Three hours later, the six women on the hill were awakened from slumber by the most frightful sounds—rapid shooting, hard galloping, blood-curdling whoops and yells—down in the village street; and knew only too well that Fult and his crowd had drunk deeply and ridden in to "shoot up" the town. Compared with this, the scattering shots of the previous Saturday and Sunday nights had been but feeble child's-play. For an hour, death and destruction seemed to be let loose. The women lay trembling in their tents, hoping against hope that no one would be killed, feeling that their summer's work had been utterly in vain; while down in the village mothers crawled under beds with their children, and lay flattened against the floor, to dodge the flying bullets.
Every person in the village sought safety but one. That one was Lethie. Directly over the street where the frenzied boys dashed back and forth, she knelt by her window, following Fult's figure in wild apprehension and terror, and sending up incoherent prayers for his safety. It was nights such as this which had saddened and aged the child beyond her years.
IX
THE DANGER LINE
The morning after the shooting-up of the village by Fult and his friends, Billy Lee, when he came up to milk the pieded heifer, brought the welcome news to the women that nobody had been killed, or even hurt, but Polly Ainslee's old sow. "The boys allus shoots mostly in the air, and if folks lays on the floor there hain't no danger," he said. "I hain't never afeared myself; but Lethie—hit's a sight how hit skeers her."
The children who came up later to Sunday School corroborated his statements. "Gee-oh! hit was like old times," they said.
Darcy Kent also spoke of it. "Of course I knowed just what hit was," he said to them, "and if it had been anybody else, I'd have come down the creek and settled 'em; but having give my word to you about the truce, I couldn't, for hit would have brought on the war again at hits worst."
"Yes, you did the only wise thing," they agreed.
He gazed frowningly down the valley. "Fallons is outlaws," he said, "and allus was, and allus will be, long as one of 'em lives. The only way is to hunt 'em down like dogs; which my family, being sheriffs for many a year, and defenders and upholders of the law, has tried hard to do."
He turned away with Annette, the cooking teacher, his tawny hair and handsome yellow eyes making an attractive contrast to her silky black hair and blue eyes.