Thus cowering, he waited, starting at every sound from below as if to run, then sinking back in fear, breathless with the pounding of his heart in his breast. Now the voices came up to him painfully clear. They were talking to little Hoyle angrily. What they were saying he could not make out, but he again cautiously lifted his head and looked below. Suddenly the child drew back and lifted his arm as if to ward off a blow, but the blow came. Frale saw one of the men turn as he mounted his horse to ride away, and cut the boy cruelly across his face and arm with his rawhide whip. The little one's shriek of fright and pain pierced his big brother to the heart and caused him to forget for the moment his own abject fear.
He made as if he would leap the intervening space to punish the brute, but a cry of anger died in his throat as he realized his situation. The selfishness of his fear, however, was dispelled, and he no longer cringed as before, but had the courage again to watch, awake and alert to all that passed beneath him.
Hoyle's cry brought Cassandra out of the house flying. She walked up to the man like an angry tigress. Frale rose to his knees and strained eagerly forward.
"If you are such a coward you must hit something small and weak, you can strike a woman. Hit me," she panted, putting the child behind her.
Muttering, the man rode sullenly away. "He no business hangin' roun' we-uns, list'nin' to all we say."
Frale could not make out the words, but his face burned red with rage. Had he been in hiding down below, he would have wreaked vengeance on the man; as it was, he stood up and boldly watched them ride away in the opposite direction from which they had come.
He sank back and waited, and again the hours passed. All was still but the rushing water and the gentle soughing of the wind in the tops of the towering pines. At last he heard a rustling and sniffing here and there. His heart stood still, then pounded again in terror. They had—they had set Nig to track him. Of course the dog would seek for his old friend and comrade, and they—they would wait until they heard his bark of joy, and then they would seize him.
He crept close to the rock where the water rushed, not a foot away, and clinging to the tough laurel behind him, leaned far over. To drop down there would mean instant death on the rocks below. It would be terrible—almost as horrible as the strangling rope. He would wait until they were on him, and then—nearer and nearer came the erratic trotting and scratching of the dog among the leaves—and then, if only he could grapple with the man who had struck his little brother, he would drag him over with him. A look of fierce joy leaped in his eyes, which were drawn to a narrow blue gleam as he waited.
Suddenly Nig burst through the undergrowth and sprang to his side, but before the dog could give his first bark of delight the yelp was crushed in his throat, and he was hurled with the mighty force of frenzy, a black, writhing streak of animate nature into the rushing water, and there swept down, tossed on the rocks, taken up and swirled about and thrown again upon the rocks, no longer animate, but a part of nature's own, to return to his primal elements.
It was done, and Frale looked at his hands helplessly, feeling himself a second time a murderer. Yet he was in no way more to blame for the first than for this. As yet a boy untaught by life, he had not learned what to do with the forces within him. They rose up madly and mastered him. With a man's power to love and hate, a man's instincts, his untamed nature ready to assert itself for tenderness or cruelty, without a man's knowledge of the necessity for self-control, where some of his kind would have been inert and listless, his inheritance had made him intense and fierce. Loving and gentle and kind he could be, yet when stirred by liquor, or anger, or fear,—most terrible.