CHAPTER XV. THE HIDDEN MENACE
Neither Kingswell nor Trigget found time for sleep that night. D'Antons also kept awake, though he spent only a few hours out-of-doors. His candle burned until daylight. Ouenwa experienced a restless night beside Black Feather's couch. From ten o'clock until two Tom Bent, John Trigget, and the younger Donnelly were on guard, with cutlasses on their hips and half-pikes in their hands—for a musket would have proved but an unsatisfactory weapon to a man engaged in a sudden scuffle in the dark. One man was placed on the gun-platform, another at the gate, and a third on the roof of the storehouse. Kingswell and William Trigget moved continually from one point to another. At two o'clock the elder Donnelly, Clotworthy, and Harding relieved their companions. But the two officers remained at their self-imposed duty.
At last dawn outlined the eastern horizon. Kingswell, who had been pacing the length of the riverward stockade for the past hour, sighed with relief, yawned, and was about to retire to D'Antons' cabin, when William Trigget approached him at a run. The master mariner's face was ghastly above his bushy whiskers.
"Come this way, sir," he murmured, huskily.
Kingswell followed him to the storehouse and up to the roof, by way of a rough ladder that leaned against the wall. There, on the outward slope of the roof, where the snow was trampled and broken, sprawled the body of Peter Clotworthy.
"What! Asleep!" exclaimed Kingswell, peering close. The light was not strong enough to disclose the features of the recumbent sentinel.
"Ay, an' sound enough, God knows," replied Trigget, "with no chance o' wakin' this side o' the Judgment-Seat."
"Dead?" cried the other, sinking to his knees beside the body. He pressed his hand against the mariner's side, held it there for a moment, and withdrew it, wet with blood. He raised it toward the growing illumination of the east, staring at it with wide eyes. "Blood," he murmured. "Stabbed without a squeal—without a whimper, by Heaven!" Then he ripped out an oath, and followed it close with a prayer for his dead comrade's soul. For all his golden curls, this Bernard Kingswell had a hot and ready tongue—and a temper to suit, when occasion offered.
The two discoverers of the tragedy remained on the roof of the storehouse for some time. The light strengthened and spread on their right, and, at last, gave them a clear, gray view of the narrow clearing and wooded hummocks to the north. On the snow below them, which was otherwise unmarked, they saw the imprints of one pair of moccasined feet. The marks did not lead to or from the near cover of the woods, but to the south, around the fort. The telltale snow showed how Clotworthy's murderer had approached close under the stockade, and, after his silent deed of violence, had jumped a distance of about twenty feet, from the roof of the store, and landed on all fours. A stain of blood, evidently from the reeking knife in the slayer's hand, smirched the snow where it was broken by his fall. From there the steps returned by the same course, but at a distance of about ten paces from the stockade.
Kingswell looked from the tracks in the snow to the colourless, distorted features of the dead seaman. Then his gaze met Trigget's deep-set eyes. He was pale, and his lips were drawn in a hard line, as if the frost had stiffened them.