Across the mountain-tops there began to be distant mutterings of thunder, and in the flashes of lightning I could see restless, dark birds wing by the small window. And save for the thunderings, there was a stillness that must have been on the waters before the first dawn reigned. I could hear my heart beat like a muffled motor, and only the uncanny wail broke the silence now and again, while once I thought I heard a woman’s stifled moan that sent a shudder to the very core of my body.
And as I lay and cowered in that darkness, the mood of self-realization came back upon me, and alone in that terror of blackness I turned at bay and faced myself. Was that coward thing I that lay helpless while a woman alone moaned away the life of her tortured child, and a plan for murder was plotted with my full knowledge? Why didn’t I run out into that dreadful night and warn the victim, stop him from stepping into the dreadful trap laid for him? And right then I impeached myself. I had been guarded and fended and had all humanity nurtured out of me, so that, rather than risk my own pitiful little life, I was willing to “lie close” and let my brother human be murdered in cold blood.
“But women are weak,” I argued in my own defense, “and terrible, wolfish things like these they cannot control or prevent. They must let them take their course.”
“Weak women have steeled themselves to the saving of their brothers and sisters centuries long,” came the still, small voice that seemed to be hovering over my breast.
“I can’t risk my own life for that of a rough moonshiner who probably spends his time whittling a stick to throw away,” I sobbed in answer to myself.
“What more important thing than whittling a stick do you do with your life?” came the question, relentlessly.
“Nothing,” I sobbed under my breath, as a vision of all the nothings I had done in my life came before me with a flash of the lightning that seemed to illumine the inside of the very inner me.
“And that other woman suffering in there, why don’t I go to her?” I demanded of myself, and failed to find an answer.
“Afraid of the roughness of some mountain man who would scarcely dare harm your brother’s ‘woman’?” I asked contemptuously from above my own breast. “You a ‘woman,’ if you let another woman watch her child die alone!”
Desperate at this goad, I sat up, and was pushing back the quilt, when the muffled sound of heavy boots came from across the clearing, and in another flash I saw a file of men, each one of whom looked ten feet tall, each with a gun on his arm, come out of the black woods and turn to the front of the house. I melted back to cover, and lay drawing breath like a drowning man.