A well directed musket fire, however, fell from the
loopholes of the blockhouses, the bullets rattling merrily against
the cover behind which the attacking forces lay.
Beverley was thinking of Alice during every moment of all this
stir and tumult He feared that she might still be a prisoner in
the fort exposed to the very bullets that his men were discharging
at every crack and cranny of those loosely constructed buildings.
Should he ever see her again? Would she care for him? What would
be the end of all this terrible suspense? Those remote forebodings
of evils, formless, shadowy, ineffable, which have harried the
lover's heart since time began, crowded all pleasant anticipations
out of his mind.
Clark, in passing hurriedly from company to company around the
line, stopped for a little while when he found Beverley.
"Have you plenty of ammunition?" was his first inquiry.
"A mighty sight more'n we kin see to shoot with," spoke up Oncle
Jazon. "It's a right smart o' dad burn foolishness to be wastin'
it on nothin'; seems like to me 'at we'd better set the dasted
fort afire an' smoke the skunks out!"
"Speak when you are spoken to, my man," said the Colonel a trifle
hotly, and trying by a sharp scrutiny to make him out in the gloom
where he crouched.
"Ventrebleu! I'm not askin' YOU, Colonel Clark, nor no other man,
when I shill speak.
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