It was the voice of my cousin Duncan, the only father I ever knew. He was constable of Urkey Village, and there was something in the voice as I heard it in the yard that told you why.
"Drop it, Joshua! Drop it, or by heavens——!"
Of Duncan I could see only the back, large and near. But the faces of the others were plain to my peep-hole between the pickets, or as plain as might be in the falling dusk. The sky overhead was still bright, but the blue shadow of the bluff lay all across that part of the town, and it deepened to a still bluer and cooler mystery under the apple-tree canopy sheltering the dooryard. I never see that light to this day, a high gloaming sifted through leaves on turf, without the faintest memory of a shiver. For that was the first I had even known of anger, the still and deadly anger of grown men.
My cousin had spoken to Joshua Blake, and I saw that Joshua held a pistol in his hand, the old, single-ball dueling weapon that had belonged to his father. His face was white, and the pallor seemed to refine still further the blade-like features of the Blake, the aquiline nose, the sloping, patrician forehead, the narrow lip, blue to the pressure of the teeth.
That was Joshua. Andrew, his brother, stood facing him three or four paces away. He was the younger of the two, the less favored, the more sensitive.
He had what no other Blake had had, a suspicion of freckle on his high, flat cheek. And he had what no one else in Urkey had then, a brace of gold teeth, the second and third to the left in the upper jaw, where Lem White's boom had caught him, jibing off the Head. They showed now as the slowly working lip revealed them, glimmering with a moist, dull sheen. He, too, was white.
His hands were empty, hanging down palms forward. But in his eyes there was no look of the defenseless: only a light of passionate contempt.
And between the two, and beyond them, as I looked, stood Mary, framed by the white pillars of the doorway, her hands at her throat and her long eyes dilated with a girl's fright more precious than exultation. So the three remained in tableau while, as if on another planet, the dusk deepened from moment to moment: Gramma Pilot, two yards away, brought supper to her squealing sow; and further off, out on the waning mirror of the harbor, a conch lowed faintly for some schooner's bait.
"Drop it, Joshua!" Duncan's voice came loud and clear.