After that, in the intervals when my terror left me, I tried to speculate upon the plan of the savages.  Their own numbers could not be great, and yet they must have known from our trace how few we were.  Scanning the ground, I noted that the forest was fairly clean of undergrowth on both sides of us.  Below, the stream ran straight, but there were growths of cane and briers.  Looking up, I saw Weldon faced about.  It was the obvious move.

But where had Tom gone?

Next my eye was caught by a little run fringed with bushes that curved around the cane near the bend.  I traced its course, unconsciously, bit by bit, until it reached the edge of a bank not fifty feet away.

All at once my breath left me.  Through the tangle of bramble stems at the mouth of the run, above naked brown shoulders there glared at me, hideously streaked with red, a face.  Had my fancy lied?  I stared again until my eyes were blurred, now tortured by doubt, now so completely convinced that my fingers almost released the trigger,—­for I had thrown the sights into line over the tree.  I know not to this day whether I shot from determination or nervousness.  My shoulder bruised by the kick, the smoke like a veil before my face, it was some moments ere I knew that the air was full of whistling bullets; and then the gun was torn from my hands, and I saw Polly Ann ramming in a new charge.

“The pistol, Davy,” she cried.

One torture was over, another on.  Crack after crack sounded from the forest—­from here and there and everywhere, it seemed—­and with a song that like a hurtling insect ran the scale of notes, the bullets buried themselves in the trunk of our oak with a chug.  Once in a while I heard Weldon’s answering shot, but I remembered my promise to Tom not to waste powder unless I were sure.  The agony was the breathing space we had while they crept nearer.  Then we thought of Tom, and I dared not glance at Polly Ann for fear that the sight of her face would unnerve me.

Then a longing to kill seized me, a longing so strange and fierce that I could scarce be still.  I know now that it comes in battle to all men, and with intensity to the hunted, and it explained to me more clearly what followed.  I fairly prayed for the sight of a painted form, and time after time my fancy tricked me into the notion that I had one.  And even as I searched the brambles at the top of the run a puff of smoke rose out of them, a bullet burying itself in the roots near Weldon, who fired in return.  I say that I have some notion of what possessed the man, for he was crazed with passion at fighting the race which had so cruelly wronged him.  Horror-struck, I saw him swing down from the bank, splash through the water with raised tomahawk, and gain the top of the run.  In less time than it takes me to write these words he had dragged a hideous, naked warrior out of the brambles, and with an avalanche of crumbling earth they slid into the waters of the creek.