The Elk Mountain pilot., 1917-02-01
CHAPTER ~.

Physical exhaustion will finally tell,
even over such handicaps as e noun
tain feather bed and the fumes of a
bockwoods cabin.
II Juanita Holland did not at last
actually fall asleep. she drifted into a
sort of nightmare coma from which
she awoke with a 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 1t that
she had subconsciously heard or imag.
ined7 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 approach-precisely as
though horsemen had sprung from thd
earth-there clattered and beat past
tho 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 tn sir
riders are in wild haste.
AS abruptly as the drumbeat had
come II 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 Ia
sand to the corner of the fence and
that after fifty yards of rough and
,, broken rock it fell away again iato an
other sound-mufiling stretch She
knew only that she was thoroughly
frightened, and that whatever the
noise was. it 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
snore. The fire flickered family and
occasionally sent up from it's white
bed of ashes dying spurt, 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 q
point. 1t 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 womans figure moved restlessly
beneath the heaped-up comforter.
So, for 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 few hours ago. The two pic
lures were hard to reconcile.
| Then, at some warning which hel
less acute ears failed to register, she
saw Fletch McNash's right hand sweeI
outward toward the wall and come VI
gripping the rife.
Still there was no word, but the eld
est boys head had risen from the
pallet
Keyed now to concert pitch. the cir
held her body rigid, and through half
closed lids looked across the din
room. While she was so staring and
pretending to sleep, there drifted from
long way off an insistent, animal
like yell with a peculiar quaver in 1t.
final note. She did not know that II
was the famous McBriar rallying cry
and that trouble inevitably fnllova<