They knew he had ridden into Alder before in the middle of the night and they might suspect the danger of such another attack, but they surely would not have fear of a solitary pedestrian unless a telltale light were thrown upon his face.
He passed Captain Lorrimer's saloon.Even in this short interval it had fallen into ill-repute after the killing at Alder.And a shanty farther down the street now did the liquor business of the town; Captain Lorrimer's was closed, and the window nailed across with slats.He went on.Partly by instinct, and partly because it was aflame with lights, he moved straight to the house at which he had learned tidings of three men he sought on his last visit to Alder.Now there were more lights showing from the windows of that place than there were in all the rest of Alder; at the hitching racks in front, horses stood tethered in long double rows, and a noise of voices rolled out and up and down the street.Undoubtedly, there was a festival there, and all Alder would turn out to such an affair.All Alder, including Vic Gregg, the seventh man.A group came down the street for the widow's house; they were laughing and shouting, and they carried lanterns; away from them Barry slipped like a ghost and stood in the shadow of the house.
There might be other such crowds, and they were dangerous to Barry, so now he hunted for a means of breaking into the house of the widow unseen.The windows, as he went down the side of the building, he noted to be high, but not too high to be reached by a skillful, noiseless climber.In the back of the house he saw the kitchen door, illumined indeed, but the room, as far as he could see, empty.
Then very suddenly a wave of silence began somewhere in a side of the house and swept across it, dying to a murmur at the edges.Barry waited for no more maneuvers, but walked boldly up the back stairs and entered the house, hat in hand.
The moment he passed the door he was alert, balanced.He could have swung to either side, or whirled and shot behind him with the precision of a leisurely marksman, and as he walked he smiled, happily with his head held high.He seemed so young, then, that one would have said he had just come in gaily from some game with the other youths of Alder.
Out of the kitchen he passed into the hall, and there he understood the meaning of the silence, for both the doors to the front room were open, and through the doors he heard a single voice, deep and solemn, and through the doors he saw the crowd standing motionless.Their heads did not stir,--heads on which the hair was plastered smoothly down--and when some one raised a hand to touch an itching ear, or nose, he moved his arm with such caution that it seemed he feared to set a magazine of powder on fire.All their backs were towards Barry, where he stood in the hall, and as he glided toward them, he heard the deep voice stop, and then the trembling voice of a girl speak in reply.
At the first entrance he paused, for the whole scene unrolled before him.
It was a wedding.Just in front of him, on chairs and even on benches, sat the majority of ***** Alder,--facing these stood the wedding pair with the minister just in front of them.He could see the girl to one side of the minister's back, and she was very pretty, very femininely appealing, now, in a dress which was a cloudy effect of white; but Barry gave her only one sharp glance.His attention was for the men of the crowd.And although there were only backs of heads, and side glimpses of faces he hunted swiftly for Vic Gregg.
But Gregg was not there.He surveyed the assembly twice, incredulous, for surely the tall man should be here, but when he was on the very point of turning on his heel and slinking down the hall to pursue his hunt in other quarters, the voice of the minister stopped, and the deep tone of Vic himself rolled through the room.
It startled Barry like a voice out of the sky; he stared about, bewildered, and then as the minister shifted his position a little he saw that it was Gregg who stood there beside the girl in white,--it was Gregg being married.And at the same moment, the eyes of Vic lifted, wandered, fell upon the face which stood there framed in the dark of the doorway.Dan saw the flush die out, saw the narrow, single-purposed face of Gregg turn white, saw his eyes widen, and his own hand closed on his gun.Another instant; the minister turned his head, seemed to be waiting, and then Gregg spoke in answer: "I will!"A thousand pictures rushed through the mind of Barry, and he remembered first and last the wounded man on the gray horse who he had saved, and the long, hard ride carrying that limp body to the cabin in the mountains.The man would fight.By the motion of Gregg's hand, Dan knew that he had gone even to his wedding armed.He had only to show his own gun to bring on the crisis, and in the meantime the eyes of Vic held steadily upon him past the shoulder of the minister, without fear, desperately.In spite of himself Dan's hand could not move his gun.In spite of himself he looked to the confused happy face of the girl.And he felt as he had felt when he set fire to his house up there in the hills.The wavering lasted only a moment longer; then he turned and slipped noiselessly down the hall, and the seventh man who should have died for Grey Molly was still alive.
