We rode into the bluff, tied up our horses and crept to the back of the shack. Looking through a crack between the logs, I saw a gruesome thing. Bruce was sitting up in bed with a Winchester rifle across his knees and a belt of cartridges hanging over the post. His bandages were torn off, the blood from his wound was smeared over his bare arms and his pale, ghastly face; his eyes were wild with mad terror, and he was shouting at the top of his voice the words:
“The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want,
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green, He leadeth me
The quiet waters by.”
Now and then he would stop to say in an awesome whisper, “Come out here, you little devils!” and bang would go his rifle at the stovepipe, which was riddled with holes. Then once more in a loud voice he would hurry to begin the Psalm,
“The Lord's my Shepherd.”
Nothing that my memory brings to me makes me chill like that picture—the low log shack, now in cheerless disorder; the ghastly object upon the bed in the corner, with blood-smeared face and arms and mad terror in the eyes; the awful cursings and more awful psalm-singing, punctuated by the quick report of the deadly rifle.
For some moments we stood gazing at one another; then The Duke said, in a low, fierce tone, more to himself than to us:
“This is the last. There'll be no more of this cursed folly among the boys.”
And I thought it a wise thing in The Pilot that he answered not a word.