‘He’ll kill us if he can,’ replied Lucius. ‘Look at his face.’
‘I reckon,’ returned Ephraim simply. ‘The old blunderbuss is mad.’
The colonel resumed his march up and down, probably wrestling with himself; for brute though he was, what manhood there was left in him could not but recoil from the deed he contemplated. For several minutes there was silence, the men standing at ease, and the captain meditatively poking holes in the ground with the point of his sword, and ever and anon casting furtive glances at the two prisoners.
The stillness became oppressive. Only the colonel’s hurried footsteps broke it irregularly, and the sound jarred so much upon Ephraim’s tense nerves that he felt he must speak at whatever cost.
‘See hyar, cunnel,’ he called out. ‘It’s cruel ter keep us standing hyar. What ye goin’ ter do with us? Remember we ain’t done ye any harm, ’ceptin’ thet whack I ketched ye jest now, and any wan would hev done ez much, makin’ a break fer freedom.—Cunnel!’
Captain Peters made Ephraim a swift sign to be silent; but the colonel, after one prolonged and malevolent stare, continued his march as though he had not heard a word.
‘The pesky critter!’ muttered Ephraim. ‘Hold up, Luce. He dassn’t do nuthin’, and he knows it too, right well. Thet’s what’s makin’ him so mad. He’d like ter chaw us up inter little bits, on’y he dassn’t.’
He stopped obedient to the captain’s signals, but the next moment his roving eye caught the gleam of gun-barrels in among the trees in the section of wood they had left when they ran for the balloon, and here and there a face peeped out and was rapidly withdrawn; so rapidly that the Grizzly rubbed his eyes and asked himself whether they had not deceived him. ‘It looked like ’em,’ he said to himself; ‘but it can’t be. How can it be? Oh, I reckon it’s some more Yanks comin’ ter see the fun.’ He held his tongue, however, and, for want of something better to do, took a piece of string from his pocket, and twisted it nervously round and round his fingers, the while he kept his eyes steadfastly fixed upon the forest opposite. But if he had seen anything, there was nothing to be seen now. Suddenly the colonel halted in his walk, turned, and approached them.
‘Now it’s comin’,’ thought Ephraim, twirling his string more rapidly than ever. Lucius stood perfectly still and erect, his hands locked behind his back, and his eyes staring straight in front of him. Whatever his feelings, they did not appear upon the surface.
The colonel’s swarthy face was deeply flushed, his black, deep-set eyes glittered menacingly under their bushy, overhanging brows, and he gnawed persistently at his long moustache. It was evident that in the struggle which had been going on in his mind, the evil had conquered the good.