"Jack Mount!" I called, "where are the women? Are they safe?"
He looked around at me, nodded in a dazed and hesitating manner, then wheeled quick as a flash, and fired through the slit in the logs.
I crawled up to the epaulment and peered down into the dusty street. It was choked with the enemy's baggage-wagons, now thrown into terrible confusion by the shot from Mount's rifle. Horses reared, backed, swerved, swung around, and broke into a terrified gallop; teamsters swore and lashed at their maddened animals, and some batmen, carrying a dead or wounded teamster, flung their limp burden into a wagon, and, seizing the horses' bits, urged them up the hill in a torrent of dust.
I fumbled for my ranger's whistle, set it to my lips, and blew the "Cease firing!"
"Let them alone!" I shouted angrily at Mount. "Have you no better work than to waste powder on a parcel of frightened clodhoppers? Send those militiamen to their posts! Two to a loop, yonder! Lively, lads; and see that you fire at nothing except Indians and soldiers. Jack, come up here!"
The big rifleman mounted the ladder and leaped to the rifle-platform, which quivered beneath his weight.
"I thought I'd best sting them once," he muttered. "Their main force has circled the town westward toward the Hall. Lord, sir, it was a bad surprise they gave us, for we understood that Willett held them at Tribes Hill!"
I caught his arm in a grip of iron, striving to speak, shaking him to silence.
"Where--where is Miss Grey?" I said hoarsely. "You say the women are safe, do you not?"
"Mr. Renault--sir--" he stammered, "I have just arrived at the jail--I have not seen your wife."
My hand fell from his arm; his appalled face whitened.
"Last night, sir," he muttered, "she was at the Hall, watching the flames in the sky where Butler was burning the Valley. I saw her there in a crowd of townsfolk, women, children--the whole town was on the lawn there----"
He wiped his clammy face and moistened his lips; above us, in the wooden tower, the clamor of the bell never ceased.
"She spoke to me, asking for news of you. I--I had no news of you to tell her. Then an officer--Captain Little--fell a-bawling for the Rangers to fall in, and Billy Laird, Jack Shew, Sammons, and me--we had to go. So I fell in, sir; and the last I saw she was standing there and looking at the reddening sky----"
Blindly, almost staggering, I pushed past him, stumbling down the ladder, across the yard, and into the lower corridor of the jail. There were women a-plenty there; some clung to my arm, imploring news; some called out to me, asking for husband or son. I looked blankly into face after face, all strangers; I mounted the stairs, pressing through the trembling throng, searching every whitewashed corridor, every room; then to the cellar, where the frightened children huddled, then out again, breaking into a run, hastening from blockhouse to blockhouse, the iron voice of the bell maddening me!