“No use to us. They’d burn the house. Smother us like rats. We’ll have to stand our ground, every one at a window. This is the way our forefathers fought savages.” His voice had grown husky.
“These are more savage than they!” Madame LeClare added.
“We might make a dash for it. Try getting away in the cars,” Tom Howe suggested.
“They may be all set to mow us down as we come out,” Drew objected. “We’ve not been watching, you know. But we’d better be, right now!” His tone changed. “We’ll set a watch at the windows. There’s one on every side. We’ll watch in pairs. Misery loves company. You and you there; you and you—” He pointed them to their places rapidly.
Johnny found himself settled upon a cushion behind the low window in the small southwest room. At his side, so close he fancied he felt her heart beat, was Alice LeClare. He thanked Drew for that. If the watch were to be long, here was pleasant company. Then, too, he had learned by the glint in her dark eyes that, if worse came to worst, if he were wounded, out of the combat, this splendid girl would fight over him as bravely and savagely as any Indian fighter’s wife had fought over her fallen man.
It was strange, the silence of the place, once they were all settled and the lights out. The fire in the cracked old stove shone red. The little clock that had ticked the good Captain’s boyhood quite away, as if it would end the suspense and bring the dawn at once, raced more furiously than before. The girl at Johnny’s side breathed steadily, evenly, as if this were but the night before Christmas and she waiting for Santa Claus in the dark.
“What a girl!” Johnny thought.
His eyes strayed through the open door at his back. Through it he caught the square of light from the north window. A semi-circle of shadow above its sill he knew to be Spider’s head. Spider was watching there alone. His post was an important one. That window looked out upon a small barn and the towering cottonwood tree. The tree was fully six feet through. The Captain had told of swinging from its branches as a child.
“It’s strange,” Johnny whispered to the girl, “sitting here in this quiet little gray house where men and women have lived their lives away without a breath to disturb their calm, waiting for an attack. It—why, it’s like the silence that must have hung over the fields of poppies in France during the Great War.”
“Do you think they’ll truly come?” Alice whispered back. “Or was it just a scare? They may be in Chicago, you know. The Whisperer is.”