By the silence outside it would seem as if everybody were murdered, massacred—coloured servants within the house, colonists without—all!
And what of Colonel Armstrong’s own daughters? To their father it is a period of dread suspense—an agony indescribable. Much longer continued it would drive him mad. Perhaps he is saved from insanity by anger—by thoughts of vengeance, and the hope of living to accomplish it.
While mutually interrogating, one starts the suggestion that the whole affair may be a travestie—a freak of the younger, and more frolicksome members of the colonist fraternity. Notwithstanding its improbability, the idea takes, and is entertained, as drowning men catch at straws.
Only for an instant. The thing is too serious, affecting personages of too much importance, to be so trifled with. There are none in the settlement who would dare attempt such practical joking with its chief—the stern old soldier, Armstrong. Besides, the sounds heard outside were not those of mirth, mocking its opposite. The shouts and shrieks had the true ring of terror, and the accents of despair.
No. It could not be anything of a merrymaking, but what they at first supposed it—a tragedy.
Their rage returns, and they think only of revenge. As before, but to feel their impotence. The door, again tried, with all their united strength, refuses to stir from its hinges. As easily might they move the walls. The window railings alike resist their efforts; and they at length leave off, despairingly scattering through the room.
One alone remains, clinging to the window bars. It is Hawkins. He stays not with any hope of being able to wrench them off. He has already tested the strength of his arms, and found it insufficient. It is that of his lungs he now is determined to exert, and does so, shouting at the highest pitch of his voice.
Not that he thinks there is any chance of its being heard at the rancheria, nearly a half-mile off, with a grove of thick timber intervening. Besides, at that late hour the settlers will be asleep.
But in the grove between, and nearer, he knows there is a tent; and inside it a man who will be awake, if not dead—his comrade, Cris Tucker.
In the hope Cris may still be in the land of the living, Hawkins leans against the window bars and, projecting his face outward, as far as the jawbones will allow, he gives utterance to a series of shouts, interlarded with exclamations, that in the ears of a sober Puritan would have sounded terribly profane.