Weaver caught the general manager by a shoulder and drew him down and out of danger. Bullets began to fairly pepper the barricade. The real seriousness of their position smote Wolfe like a blow. He wasn't used to this.
"Look up there!" said Weaver, pointing toward the Big Blackfern's jaw of Devil's Gate.
Old Buck Wolfe and his men, all of them armed, stood in plain view up there among the boulders.
"If your people don't help us," Weaver went on, "right here is where we either stick up a white flag, or check out. We can't handle the Singletons; there's too many of them. Let me ask your father for help!"
"No!" Wolfe objected. "No to the white flag, too!"
But Weaver was already shouting lustily to the leader of the Wolfes.
And Old Buck roared back this, "No, sirree! I've done promised I'd never start another fight wi' the Singletons!"
Then a great silence fell over everything. The Singletons were saving ammunition, and waiting patiently for a man inside the puny barricade to show his head. Wolfe knew they wouldn't wait long. He knew they would become impatient, and rush the barricade. He looked around at the groveling negroes. Their lives were in his keeping; he was responsible for their safety. For their sake, he decided that he would humiliate himself in the eyes of both the Singletons and the Wolfes.
He drew from his pocket a white handkerchief, ever the emblem of rank cowardice to the mountaineer, and began to knot a corner of it to a sourwood switch.
But it was not necessary that he suffer the humiliation of being looked upon as a coward. A big, square-chested man came running up the track; he bellowed two words that were as magic—"Go home!"