Thus the cordon was drawn close about the house, in which the inmates still showed no signs of life. The horsemen dismounted and tied their horses to the fence, and then, with an armed guard, advanced to the door. Lieutenant Coleman looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes after seven. At seven twenty-eight the old mountaineer appeared, and was passed down the line to the road. Next came the three officers, one after the other, and they were removed to one side under guard. Then the four women seemed to be driven out of the house by the soldiers, and forced along by violence into the road. Some of the men appeared to be breaking the windows of the cabin, and others were running out of the open door, appropriating some objects and ruthlessly destroying others. For the first time the soldier exiles realized how far they were removed, by their own will, from a world in which they had no part. The sufferers were their friends whom they knew not, and to help whom they had no power. They were like spirits looking down from a world above on the passions of mortals--as helpless to interfere as the motionless rocks. After a brief consultation the mounted men rode away to the north, while the prisoners, with their guards, advanced in the opposite direction and soon disappeared behind that ridge up which Shifless had climbed to look over in the gray of the morning of the day before. A puff of smoke burst from the deserted cabin and rose like a tower into the frosty air. Fire gleamed through the broken windows, and red tongues of flame licked about the dry logs, and lashed and forked under the eaves and about the edges of the shingled roof. The reflection from the flames reddened the snow in the little clearing. The stacks caught fire. The boughs of the orchard withered and crisped in the fierce heat. Now, as if satisfied with their work of destruction, the men who had remained at the house joined the others behind the ridge, and the armed guards, with their miserable prisoners, soon reappeared, moving over the snow under the bare trees. The three soldiers lay out on the rocks above to watch the poor captives picking their way down a stony, winding trail, forming one straggling file between two flanking columns of mountaineers. Knowing something of the stoical ways of these people, they could feel the silence of that gloomy progress. They even fancied they could hear the crunching of the snow, the rolling of displaced stones on the frosty hillside, the crackling of brittle twigs under foot, and the subdued sobbing of the women.