Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/111

 and she drew the covers closer. Oh, what a country to live in! Whatever was to become of them! Her teeth chattered.

She thought she heard footsteps and raised her head slightly to listen. Faint at first, they were coming nearer. Whoever was out a night like this, she could not imagine. The person was walking in the middle of the road and his progress was uneven, stopping sometimes altogether, then going forward. Abreast the house the sound of heels grinding in the snow that was dry as powder was like the scrunching and squealing of the steel tire of a wagon in bitter weather.

They passed, grew fainter, finally stopped altogether. Mrs. Toomey moved closer to her husband. There was comfort in the nearness of a human being.

A shot! Her heart jumped—her nerves twanged with the shock of it. "That hit something !" The thought was almost simultaneous. The sound was more like an explosion—deadened, muffled somewhat—as of a charge fired into a bale of hay or cotton. For the space of a dozen heartbeats she lay with her mouth open, breathless in the deathly silence of the frozen night.

A scream! It must have reached the sky. Piercing, agonized—the agony of a man screaming with his mouth wide open—screaming without restraint, in animal-like unconsciousness of what he was doing.

"Jap!" She clutched his arm and shook him.

The screams kept coming, blood curdling, as if they would split the throat, tear it, and horrible with suffering.

"Jap! " She sat up and shook his shoulder violently.

"Wha's the matter?'" he asked, sleepily.

"Did you hear that shot? Listen!"

"Some drunk," he mumbled.

"He's hurt, I tell you! Hear him!"