Читать книгу Adventures in Silence онлайн

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He thrust a pistol into John’s hand and took him by the arm as the boys silently opened the door and passed out with the dogs. John found himself following. In the moonlight they crept along the shadow of the buildings out to the point where the woods crawled in almost to the barn. There the old man crept off to one side. For the moment the moon was obscured by a passing cloud. Then its light burst upon them, and John from his hiding-place distinctly saw three forms crawling slowly across the grassy field to the back of the barn. In the clear moonlight he could distinguish three white faces, peering through the deep grass. They would move slowly forward a few feet, and then halt, apparently to listen. The deaf man in this strange, lonely place, thought he saw three desperate men making their way to the barn buildings. This very thing had been described in one of the stories he had read; three mountaineers had crawled slowly through the grass to set fire to the barn. And it came to John’s mind that these three white-faced fiends were creeping up to burn down this home and then shoot down its occupants by the light from the burning! The nearest crawler came slowly to within two rods of John and raised his head to look about him. As viewed in the moonlight it seemed a hideous face, hardly human in its aspect.