Lee now interposed.
"Yes, Brother Rae, as defenseless as that pretty sister of yours was in the woods there, that afternoon at Haun's Mill." The reminder silenced him for the moment.

When he could listen again, he heard them canvassing a plan of attack that should succeed without endangering any of their own numbers.

He walked away from the group to see if alone, out of the tumult and torrent of lies and half-truths, he could not fetch some one great unmistakable truth which he felt instinctively was there.
And then his ears responded again to the slow chant and the constant measured beat of the flat-toned, vibrant drum.

Something in its rhythm searched and penetrated and swayed and seemed to overwhelm him.

It came as the measured, insistent beat of fate itself, relentless, inexorable; and all the time it was stirring in him vague, latent instincts of savagery.