There was a bottle of rum in the cupboard, which my brother the sailor had left with us the last time he was ashore.I drank a drop of it.Never before or since have I put anything down my throat that did me half so much good as that precious mouthful of rum!
I was still sitting in the window-seat drying my face, when Isuddenly heard their voices close behind me.
They were feeling the outside of the window against which I was sitting.It was protected, like all the other windows in the cottage, by iron bars.I listened in dreadful suspense for the sound of filing, but nothing of the sort was audible.They had evidently reckoned on frightening me easily into letting them in, and had come unprovided with house-breaking tools of any kind.Afresh burst of oaths informed me that they had recognized the obstacle of the iron bars.I listened breathlessly for some warning of what they were going to do next, but their voices seemed to die away in the distance.They were retreating from the window.Were they also retreating from the house altogether? Had they given up the idea of effecting an entrance in despair?
A long silence followed--a silence which tried my courage even more severely than the tumult of their first attack on the cottage.
Dreadful suspicions now beset me of their being able to accomplish by treachery what they had failed to effect by force.
Well as I knew the cottage, I began to doubt whether there might not be ways of cunningly and silently entering it against which Iwas not provided.The ticking of the clock annoyed me; the crackling of the fire startled me.I looked out twenty times in a minute into the dark corners of the passage, straining my eyes, holding my breath, anticipating the most unlikely events, the most impossible dangers.Had they really gone, or were they still prowling about the house? Oh, what a sum of money I would have given only to have known what they were about in that interval of silence!
I was startled at last out of my suspense in the most awful manner.A shout from one of them reached my ears on a sudden down the kitchen chimney.It was so unexpected and so horrible in the stillness that I screamed for the first time since the attack on the house.My worst forebodings had never suggested to me that the two villains might mount upon the roof.
"Let us in, you she-devil!" roared a voice down the chimney.
There was another pause.The smoke from the wood fire, thin and light as it was in the red state of the embers at that moment, had evidently obliged the man to take his face from the mouth of the chimney.I counted the seconds while he was, as Iconjectured, getting his breath again.In less than half a minute there came another shout:
"Let us in, or we'll burn the place down over your head!"Burn it? Burn what? There was nothing easily combustible but the thatch on the roof; and that had been well soaked by the heavy rain which had now fallen incessantly for more than six hours.
Burn the place over my head? How?
While I was still casting about wildly in my mind to discover what possible danger there could be of fire, one of the heavy stones placed on the thatch to keep it from being torn up by high winds came thundering down the chimney.It scattered the live embers on the hearth all over the room.A richly-furnished place, with knickknacks and fine muslin about it, would have been set on fire immediately.Even our bare floor and rough furniture gave out a smell of burning at the first shower of embers which the first stone scattered.
For an instant I stood quite horror-struck before this new proof of the devilish ingenuity of the villains outside.But the dreadful danger I was now in recalled me to my senses immediately.There was a large canful of water in my bedroom, and I ran in at once to fetch it.Before I could get back to the kitchen a second stone had been thrown down the chimney, and the floor was smoldering in several places.
I had wit enough to let the smoldering go on for a moment or two more, and to pour the whole of my canful of water over the fire before the third stone came down the chimney.The live embers on the floor I easily disposed of after that.The man on the roof must have heard the hissing of the fire as I put it out, and have felt the change produced in the air at the mouth of the chimney, for after the third stone had descended no more followed it.As for either of the ruffians themselves dropping down by the same road along which the stones had come, that was not to be dreaded.
The chimney, as I well knew by our experience in cleaning it, was too narrow to give passage to any one above the size of a small boy.
I looked upward as that comforting reflection crossed my mind--Ilooked up, and saw, as plainly as I see the paper I am now writing on, the point of a knife coming through the inside of the roof just over my head.Our cottage had no upper story, and our rooms had no ceilings.Slowly and wickedly the knife wriggled its way through the dry inside thatch between the rafters.It stopped for a while, and there came a sound of tearing.That, in its turn, stopped too; there was a great fall of dry thatch on the floor; and I saw the heavy, hairy hand of Shifty ****, armed with the knife, come through after the fallen fragments.He tapped at the rafters with the back of the knife, as if to test their strength.Thank God, they were substantial and close together!
Nothing lighter than a hatchet would have sufficed to remove any part of them.
The murderous hand was still tapping with the knife when I heard a shout from the man Jerry, coming from the neighborhood of my father's stone-shed in the back yard.The hand and knife disappeared instantly.I went to the back door and put my ear to it, and listened.