Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1915-11-24
CHAPTER ".

Physical exhaustion will finally tell,
even over such handicaps as noun
tain feather bed and the fumes of a
backwoods cabin.
If Juanita Holland did not at last
actually fall asleep, she drifted into a
sort Of nightmare coma from which
she awoke with start.
Finally she fell again into that half
sleep which dreams of wakefulness.
It may have lasted minutes or hours,
but suddenly she reused again with a
start from a new nightmare and lay
trembling under the oppression of a
poignant foreboding. What was it that
she had subconsciously heard or mag
ined? She was painfully wide awake
in the slumbering cabin. At last she
was sure of sound, low but instinct
with warning.
Beardog was growing just outside
the door.
Then, violently and without the pref
ace of gradual precisely as
though horsemen had sprung from the
earth-there clattered and beat past
the front of the cabin a staccato thun-
der Of wildly galloping hoofs and a
rattle of scattered rocks. She felt an
uncanny freezing of her marrow.
Horses travel perilous and broken
roads in that fashion only when their
riders are in wild haste.
AS abruptly as the drumbeat had
come It died again into silence, and
there was no diminuendo Of hoofbeats
receding into distance. The thing was
weird and ghostly. She had not no.
ticed in the WEAKNESS of her arrival at
the cabin that the road ran deep in
sand to the corner of the fence and
that after fifty yards of rough and
broken rock it fell away again into an
other sound-muffiing stretch. She
knew only that she was thoroughly
frightened, and that whatever the
noise was, 1t proclaimed hot and des-
perate haste.
Yet even in her terror she had
moved only to turn her head and had
opened her eyes cautiously and mar
rowly.
There was no sound in the cabin
now; not even the stertorous breath Of
a snore. The fire flickered family and
occasionally sent up from it's white
bed of ashes a dying squirt, before
which the darkness fell back little
for the moment.
She could see that Fletch McNash
had half risen in his bed. His head
was partly turned in an attitude of
intent listening, and his pose was as
rigid as that of bird-dog frozen on
point. It had all been momentary, and
as Juanita gazed she saw other fig
ures stir uneasily, though no one
spoke. The missionary lay still, but
the woman's figure moved restlessly
beneath the heaped-up comforter.
So, for a few moments, the strange
and tense tableau held, and the girl,
watching the householder's alert yet
motionless pose, remembered him as
he had hunched drunkenly over his
plate a few hours ago. The two pic
lures we're hard to reconcile.
Then. at some warning which her
less acute ears failed to register, she
saw Fletch McNash's right hand sweep
outward toward the wall and come up
gripping the rifle.
Still there was no word, but the eld-
est boys head had risen from the
pallet.
Keyed now to concert pitch. the girl
held her body rigid, and through half
closed lids looked across the dim
room. While she was SO staring and
pretending to sleep, there drifted from
a long way off an insistent, animal
like yell with a peculiar quaver in its
final note. She did not know that 1t
was the famous McBriar rallying cry,
and that trouble inevitably followed