At that very moment, too, the guard behind the stone gateway, catching the shuffle of feet behind the thicket of paw-paws that grew just outside the gate, caught his breath hard and, shifting his rifle to the other arm, dropped back into the deeper shadows.
“As I was about to remark,” the old man turned to Florence with a look of resolution on his face, “’t’ain’t no mite o’ sense in keepin’ you here, not narry ’nother minute. There’s little Hallie, she’s might nigh well. There’s that sorry trial to-morrow, an’ that ’lection. They’ll be ailing fer you down there at the mouth of the creek, plumb ailin’, so it’s fittin’ that you’d go. You tell Zeb Howard down thar by the gate that I sent you, and I reckon he’ll let you by.”
Florence caught her breath. She had heard the old man’s story. She was free. She might go. For a moment, as a wild bird, made captive for a day and then set free hesitates before his first free flight, she sat there in silence. Then, as if impelled by the sense of impending peril and a great need, she rose and hurried away.
Need enough there was, too. Her fleet feet could not cover that distance too quickly, for at that moment hot words were passing thick and fast before the stone gateway.
As she paused in her sudden flight she caught the sound of these angry voices. At first indistinct, then growing louder as she rounded a curve, she caught fragments of sentences:
“Narry a step.”—“Hit are!”—“Hit are not!”—“Drop down the barrel of that ar gun!”—“Hit’s plumb unnatural!”
Then, having caught a hint of the meaning of it all, she paused to strain her ears to catch the lowest word. At that moment there came the ominous click of a cartridge being thrown into its place in a rifle barrel. This sound came from within the gate.
“The guard,” she whispered.
“I tell you all plain,” there came from the same spot a second later, “we all don’t mean you all narry bit of harm. You all go on back down that crick. The land down thar belongs to you all. Up here it’s ourn. Don’t let’s have any trouble.”
“’An’ I’m tellin’ you, stranger,” came in an equally insistent voice, “we all are goin’ through. You are got someone up that we want and are goin’ to git!”