“It may waken Boyd Connoway,” I thought, “but that will be all. He will come sneaking through the wood to see what is the matter so as to tell about it, but he never used a weapon more deadly than a jack-knife with a deer-horn handle.”
As Irma’s foot slipped on the bottom rung of the ladder, I caught her as she swayed, and for a moment in that dark place I held her in my hands like a posy, fresh and sweet smelling, but sacred as if in church. She said, without drawing herself away, at least not for a moment longer than she need, “Duncan, you saved my life!”
I had it on my tongue tip to reply, “And my own at the same time, for I could not live without you!”
When one is young it is natural to talk like that, but my old awe of Miss Irma preserved me from the mistake. It was too early days for that, and I only said, “I am glad!” And when we got down there was Agnes Anne, with her finger on her lip, watching little Sir Louis sleeping. She whispered to me to know why we had made such a noise firing on the top of the tower.
“It isn’t like down in the cellar,” she said, “you came as near as you can think to wakening him!”
I was so astonished that I could not even tell Agnes Anne that she would soon find it was not we who had done the firing. The most part of the guns were in the cellar any way, as she might have remembered. Besides, what was the use? She had caught that fell disease, which is baby-worship.
Instead, I posted myself in the window, my body hidden in the red rep curtain, and only my eyes showing through a slit I made with my knife as I peered along the barrel of “King George.” I had resolved that with an arm of such short “carry,” I would not fire till I had them right beneath the porch, or at least coming up the steps of the mansion.
It was in my mind that there would be a brutal rush at the door, perhaps with pickaxes, perhaps with one of the swinging battering-rams I had read of in the Roman wars, that do such wondrous things when cradled in the joined hands of many men.
But in this I was much mistaken. The assailants were indeed rascals of the same tarry, broad-breeched, stringfasted breed as Galligaskins of the cellar door. But Galligaskins himself I saw not. From which I judge that Agnes Anne had sorted him to rights with the contents of “King George,” laid ready for her pointing at the top of the steps by which an enemy must of necessity appear.
But they had a far more powerful weapon than any battering-ram. We saw them moving about in the faint light of a moon in her last quarter just risen above the hills—a true moon of the small hours, ruddy as a fox and of an aspect exceedingly weariful.