And as I lay and cowered in that darkness, the mood of self-realization came back upon me, and alone in that terror of blackness I turned at bay and faced myself. Was that coward thing I that lay helpless while a woman alone moaned away the life of her tortured child, and a plan for murder was plotted with my full knowledge? Why didn’t I run out into that dreadful night and warn the victim, stop him from stepping into the dreadful trap laid for him? And right then I impeached myself. I had been guarded and fended and had all humanity nurtured out of me, so that, rather than risk my own pitiful little life, I was willing to “lie close” and let my brother human be murdered in cold blood. “But women are weak,” I argued in my own defense, “and terrible, wolfish things like these they cannot control or prevent. They must let them take their course.” “Weak women have steeled themselves to the saving of their brothers and sisters centuries long,” came the still, small voice that seemed to be hovering over my breast. “I can’t risk my own life for that of a rough moonshiner who probably spends his time whittling a stick to throw away,” I sobbed in answer to myself. “What more important thing than whittling a stick do you do with your life?” came the question, relentlessly. “Nothing,” I sobbed under my breath, as a vision of all the nothings I had done in my life came before me with a flash of the lightning that seemed to illumine the inside of the very inner me. “And that other woman suffering in there, why don’t I go to her?” I demanded of myself, and failed to find an answer. “Afraid of the roughness of some mountain man who would scarcely dare harm your brother’s ‘woman’?” I asked contemptuously from above my own breast. “You a ‘woman,’ if you let another woman watch her child die alone!” Desperate at this goad, I sat up, and was pushing back the quilt, when the muffled sound of heavy boots came from across the clearing, and in another flash I saw a file of men, each one of whom looked ten feet tall, each with a gun on his arm, come out of the black woods and turn to the front of the house. I melted back to cover, and lay drawing breath like a drowning man. Quietly they came into the room next to that in which I was hiding, and their drawly voices had a subdued and terrible sound as they exchanged a few remarks in guarded tones. “Leader come?” one man asked from so near the pine board against which I trembled that he couldn’t have been a foot away from me. “Naw; and Bill is waiting in the woods to ketch him ’fore he gits here, if he kin,” came the mumble of my host’s big voice. “It’ll be nip and tuck ’twixt ’em, and lay out the worst man feet due west,” another voice took up the gruesome chorus. “That’s Bill now, coming outen the woods,” exclaimed Stivers, ominously. “I reckon he thinks he missed Leader. Don’t nobody say nothing when he comes in, but let him set and wait for his knock-out. Nobody’s business but Leader’s.”