"Is it him?" he whispered. "D'you hear him?"
"Hush!" commanded two voices, and then he saw that old Joe Cumberland also was listening.
"No," said the girl suddenly, "it was only the wind."
As if in answer, a far, faint whistling broke upon them. She drew her hands slowly towards her breast, as if, indeed, she drew the sound in with them.
"He's coming!" she cried. "Oh, Dad, listen! Don't you hear?"
"I do," answered the rancher, "but what I'm hearin' don't warm my blood none. Kate, if you're wise you'll get up and go to your room and don't pay no heed to anything you might be hearin' to-night."
CHAPTER XLII
THE JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
There was no doubting the meaning of Joe Cumberland. It grew upon them with amazing swiftness, as if the black stallion were racing upon the house at a swift gallop, and the whistling rose and rang and soared in a wild outburst. Give the eagle the throat of the lark, and after he has struck down his prey in the centre of the sky and sent the ragged feathers and the slain body falling down to earth, what would be the song of the eagle rising again and dwindling out of sight in the heart of the sky? What terrible pean would he send whistling down to the dull earth far below? And such was the music that came before the coming of Dan Barry. It did not cease, as usual, at a distance, but it came closer and closer, and it swelled around them. Buck Daniels had risen from his chair and stolen to a corner of the room where not a solitary shaft of light could possibly reach him; and Kate Cumberland slipped farther into the depths of the big chair.
So that, in their utter silence, in spite of the whistling that blew in upon them, they could hear the dull ticking of the tall clock, and by a wretched freak of fate the ticking fell exactly in with the soaring rhythm of the whistle and each had a part in the deadliness of the other.