Had
the night been less still, had his ears been less ready for any sound
the faint creak-creak would not have reached him.
"Woman or man?" was his problem. "Winifred Waverly or Henry Pollard?"
There came a second sound and this he recognized; the scraping of dry
wood against dry wood, the moving of the bars which the countryside knew
that Henry Pollard used as the nightlock upon his doors. Thornton drew
back a little, step by step, slowly, silently, and stopped under the
pear trees. Now he was ten feet from the first of the front steps, ten
feet from the board walk.
When a man must trust everything to his ears for guidance his ears
may tell him much. Thornton knew when the bars were down and when the
door was opening very slowly. And then, suddenly, he knew that there
was a third person out here in the garden close to him, and that this
person ... man or woman? ... was moving with as great a slow caution as
himself and the other some one in the house. There was the crack of a
twig snapping underfoot ... silence ... slow cautious steps again.
The cowboy moved again, a bare two steps now, and stopped, his back
against the trunk of the largest of the pear trees, his eyes running
back and forth between the door he could not see and the moving some one
he could not see at the corner of the house.
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