when he led Celie to her room and urged her to go to
bed. An hour later, listening at her door, he believed that she was
asleep. He had waited for that, and quietly he prepared for the
hazardous undertaking he had set for himself. He put on his cap and
coat and seized the club he had taken from Bram's bed. Then very
cautiously he opened the outer door. A moment later he stood outside,
the door closed behind him, with the storm pounding in his face.

Fifty yards away he could not have heard the shout of a man. And yet he
listened, gripping his club hard, every nerve in his body strained to a
snapping tension. Somewhere within that small circle of the corral were
Bram Johnson's wolves, and as he hesitated with his back to the door he
prayed that there would come no lull in the storm during the next few
minutes. It was possible that he might evade them with the crash and
thunder of the gale about him. They could not see him, or hear him, or
even smell him in that tumult of wind unless on his way to the gate he
ran into them. In that moment he would have given a year of life to
have known where they were. Still listening, still fighting to hear
some sound of them in the shriek of the storm, he took his first step
out into the pit of darkness. He did not run, but went as cautiously as
though the night was a dead calm, the club half poised in his hands. He
had measured the distance and the direction of the gate and when at
last he touched the saplings of the stockade he knew that he could not
be far off in his reckoning. Ten paces to the right he found the gate
and his heart gave a sudden jump of relief. Half a minute more and it
was open. He propped it securely against the beat of the storm with the
club he had taken from Bram Johnson's bed.

Then he turned back to the cabin, with the little revolver clutched in
his hand, and his face was strained and haggard when he found the door
and returned again into the glow of the candle-light. In the center of
the room, her face as white as his own, stood Celie. A great fear must
have gripped her, for she stood there in her sleeping gown with her
hands clutched at her breast, her eyes staring at him in speechless
questioning. He explained by opening the door a bit and pantomiming to
the gate outside the cabin.

"The wolves will be gone in the morning," he said, a ring of triumph in
his voice. "I have opened the gate. There is nothing in our way now."

She understood. Her eyes were