“On Lookout Rock!” she breathed.
The story of that rock they knew too well. In earlier days, when a deadly feud was raging up and down the creek, this rock had been the lookout for Black Blevens’ clan. There, on top of the rock, with rifle at his side, a clansman would watch the movements of his enemy. Smoke curling from a distant chimney, a woman hoeing corn in the field, the distant boom of a rifle, all were signs that he read and passed on by signals to his distant clansmen.
“There hasn’t been a watcher on that rock for years, they say,” said Florence. Her teeth were fairly chattering.
“See! He’s looking this way. Seems that he must be expecting something to happen.”
“Wha—what could it be?”
Florence stood trembling, all unnerved for one instant. Then, having shaken herself as one will to awaken from an unpleasant dream, she became her brave self again.
It was well she regained her courage. Fifteen minutes later, while Marion was outside beneath a great beech tree, hearing a lesson, Florence sat watching over a study hour. On hearing a sound of commotion she looked up quickly to see her fifty children running for doors and windows. In the back of the room Bud Wax and Ballard Skidmore stood glaring at each other and reaching for their hip pockets.
One instant the teacher’s head whirled. The next that dread rumor sped through her brain: “Bud has been carrying his pistol gun to school.”
Then, like a powerful mechanical thing, she went into action. One instant she had leaped from the platform; the next found her half way down the aisle. Before the slow muscles of Bud’s arm had carried a hand to his pocket, he felt both wrists held in a vice-like grip and a voice that was strange, even to the speaker herself, said:
“Ballard Skidmore, leave the room. All the rest of you take your seats.”