“Toc! Toc!” came the sounds. And then a pause as if the woodsman had straightened himself up and was wiping his brow. The timing of the strokes was very slow. Probably, therefore, the labour itself was fatiguing. Sometimes, too, the axe fell with a different swing, as if other hands grasped it, but always with the same dull thudding and irritating slowness.
Then Agnes Anne made an astonishing proposition.
“See here, Duncan,” she whispered, “let me out by the little postern door at the foot of the tower. Miss Irma can watch behind it to let me in if I come running back, and you stay on the top ready with ‘King George.’ I will find out for you everything you want to know.” And I got ready to say, brother-like, “Agnes Anne, you are a fool—your legs would give way under you in the first hundred yards.”
But somehow she saw (or felt) the speech that was coming, and cut me short.
“No, I wouldn’t either,” she said hurriedly and quite boldly. “You think that because I hate that great thing there filled with powder and slugs (which even you can’t tell when it will go off, or what harm it will do when it does) that I am a coward. I am no more frightened than you are yourself—perhaps less. Who was the best tracker when we played at Indians and colonists, I should like to know? Who could go most quietly through the wood? Or run the quickest? Just me, Agnes Anne MacAlpine!”
Well, I had to admit it. These things were true. But then they had little to do with courage. This was serious. It was taking one’s life in one’s hand.
“And pray what are we doing here and now?” snapped Agnes Anne. “If they are strong enough to break in one of the doors, or get through one of the windows, what can we do? Till we know what is coming against us, we are only going from one blunder to another!”
Now this was most astonishing of our Agnes Anne. So I told her that I had known that Irma was plucky, but not her. And she only said, very shortly, “Better come and see!”
So we went down and told Irma. At first she was all against opening any door, even for a moment, on any account. The strength of these defences was our only protection. She would rather do anything than endanger that. But we made her listen to the slow thud of the axe out in the wood, and even as we looked the figure of a man passed across the glade, black against the greyish-green of the grass, on which a thick rise of dew was catching the starlight.
This figure wrapped in a sea-cloak, with head bent forward, passing across the pale glimmer of the glade, sufficed to alter the mind of Irma. She agreed in a moment, and locking the door of little Louis’s room, she declared herself willing to keep watch behind the little postern door of the tower, ready to let Agnes Anne in again, on the understanding that I should be prepared from the open window above to deal with any pursuer.