ps
three-quarters of an hour when in the shadowed darkness beyond the walls
the figure of a boy halted, heavily panting.

Boone paused only for a little, testing the condition of his rifle's
breech and bolt, recovering his spent breath. Then he slipped nearer and
peered through the slit where a board had been broken away in the wall
itself. Within he saw figures bending forward and intent--and his brow
knit into furrows as he took in at a glance the division of the clans,
each to its separate side of the house. They had come, Saul said, to
bring peace out of dissension, but they had paradoxically arranged
themselves in readiness for conflict.

Through a gaping door at the rear, of which he knew, and which lay as
invisible as a rent in a black curtain, because the shadows held
undisputed sway back there, the boy made a noiseless entrance. Up a
ladder, for the rungs of which he had to feel blindly, he climbed to a
perch on the cross-beams, under the eaves, and still he was as blanketed
from view as a bat in an unlighted cavern. The only dim ghost of glow
that went with him were two faint phosphorescent points where he had
rubbed the sights of his rifle with the moistened heads of matches.

For the eloquence of the speaker, which would at another time have
enthralled him, he had now no thought, because lying flattened on a
great square-hewn timber, he was searching the crowd for the face of Tom
Carr.

Soon he made it out below him, to his right, and slowly he trained his
rifle upon the breast beneath the face.

That was all he had to do for the present--except to wait.

When Asa came in, if matters went badly and if Tom made a motion to his
holster or a gesture to his minions, there would be one thing more, but
it involved only the crooking of a finger which snuggled ready in the
trigger-guard.

The boy's muscles were badly cramped up there as the minutes lengthened
and multiplied. The timber was hard and the air chill, but he dared not
invite discovery by free movement.

Then suddenly with a short and incisive sentence following on longer and
more rounded phrases, the speaker fell silent. Boone could not properly
appreciate the ready adroitness with which General Prince had clipped
his oratory short without the seeming of a marred effect. He only knew
that the voice spoke crisply and halted and that the speaker was
reaching out his hand, with matter-of-fact gesture, toward the gourd in
the water bucket on the ta