PAGE 15
Three Miraculous Soldiers
by
“I’ve got him,” said the sentry calmly and without moving. It was as if the barrel of the carbine rested on piers of stone. The three comrades turned and plunged into the darkness.
In the orchard it seemed as if two gigantic animals were engaged in a mad, floundering encounter, snarling, howling in a whirling chaos of noise and motion. In the barn the prisoner and his guard faced each other in silence.
As for the girl at the knot-hole, the sky had fallen at the beginning of this clamour. She would not have been astonished to see the stars swinging from their abodes, and the vegetation, the barn, all blow away. It was the end of everything, the grand universal murder. When two of the three miraculous soldiers who formed the original feed-box corps emerged in detail from the hole under the beam, and slid away into the darkness, she did no more than glance at them.
Suddenly she recollected the head with silver eyes. She started forward and again applied her eyes to the knot-hole. Even with the din resounding from the orchard, from up the road and down the road, from the heavens and from the deep earth, the central fascination was this mystic head. There, to her, was the dark god of the tragedy.
The prisoner in grey at this moment burst into a laugh that was no more than a hysterical gurgle.”Well, you can’t hold that gun out for ever! Pretty soon you’ll have to lower it.”
The sentry’s voice sounded slightly muffled, for his cheek was pressed against the weapon.”I won’t be tired for some time yet.”
The girl saw the head slowly rise, the eyes fixed upon the sentry’s face. A tall, black figure slunk across the cow-stalls and vanished back of old Santo’s quarters. She knew what was to come to pass. She knew this grim thing was upon a terrible mission, and that it would reappear again at the head of the little passage between Santo’s stall and the wall, almost at the sentry’s elbow; and yet when she saw a faint indication as of a form crouching there, a scream from an utterly new alarm almost escaped her.
The sentry’s arms, after all, were not of granite. He moved restively. At last he spoke in his even, unchanging tone: “Well, I guess you’ll have to climb into that feed-box. Step back and lift the lid.”
“Why, you don’t mean—-“
“Step back!”
The girl felt a cry of warning arising to her lips as she gazed at this sentry. She noted every detail of his facial expression. She saw, moreover, his mass of brown hair bunching disgracefully about his ears, his clear eyes lit now with a hard, cold light, his forehead puckered in a mighty scowl, the ring upon the third finger of the left hand.”Oh, they won’t kill him! Surely they won’t kill him!” The noise of the fight in the orchard was the loud music, the thunder and lightning, the rioting of the tempest which people love during the critical scene of a tragedy.
When the prisoner moved back in reluctant obedience, he faced for an instant the entrance of the little passage, and what he saw there must have been written swiftly, graphically in his eyes. And the sentry read it and knew then that he was upon the threshold of his death. In a fraction of time, certain information went from the grim thing in the passage to the prisoner, and from the prisoner to the sentry. But at that instant the black formidable figure arose, towered, and made its leap. A new shadow flashed across the floor when the blow was struck.