Part 4 (1/2)

With his revolver c.o.c.ked and trained upon this patch of grayness, Lockwood waited, holding his breath.

The gallop came blundering on, sounding in the night's silence as loud as the pa.s.sage of an express train; and the echo of it, flung back from the canon side, confused it and distorted it till, to Lockwood's morbid alertness, it seemed fraught with all the madness of flight, all the hurry of desperation.

Then the hoof-beats rose to a roar, and a shadow just darker than the darkness heaved against the grayness that Lockwood held covered with his pistol. Instantly he shouted aloud:

”Halt! Throw up your hands!”

His answer was a pistol shot.

He dug his heels to his horse, firing as the animal leaped forward. The horses crashed together, rearing, plunging, and Lockwood, as he felt the body of a man crush by him on the trail, clutched into the clothes of him, and, with the pistol pressed against the very flesh, fired again, crying out as he did so:

”Drop your gun, Reno! I know you. I'll kill you if you move again!”

And then it was that a wail rose into the night, a wail of agony and mortal apprehension:

”Signor Lockwude, Signor Lockwude, for the love of G.o.d, don't shoot!

'Tis I--Chino Zavalla.”

VI. THE DISCOVERY OF FELICE

An hour later, Felice, roused from her sleep by loud knocking upon her door, threw a blanket about her slim body, serape fas.h.i.+on, and opened the cabin to two gaunt scarecrows, who, the one, half supported by the other, himself far spent and all but swooning, lurched by her across the threshold and brought up wavering and b.l.o.o.d.y in the midst of the cabin floor.

”_Por Dios! Por Dios!_” cried Felice. ”Ah, love of G.o.d! what misfortune has befallen Chino!” Then in English, and with a swift leap of surprise and dismay: ”Ah, Meester Lockwude, air you hurt? Eh, tell me-a! Ah, it is too draidful!”

”No, no,” gasped Lockwood, as he dragged Chino's unconscious body to the bed Felice had just left. ”No; I--I've shot him. We met--there on the trail.” Then the nerves that had stood strain already surprisingly long snapped and crisped back upon themselves like broken harp-strings.

”_I've shot him! I've shot him!_” he cried. ”Shot him, do you understand? Killed him, it may be. Get the doctor, quick! He's at the office. I pa.s.sed Chino on the trail over to the Hill. He'd hid in the bushes as he heard me coming from behind, then when I came back I took him. Oh, I'll explain later. Get the doctor, quick.”

Felice threw on such clothes as came to her hand and ran over to the office, returning with the doctor, half dressed and blinking in the lantern-light. He went in to the wounded man at once, and Lockwood, at the end of all strength, dropped into the hammock on the porch, stretching out his leg to ease the anguish of his broken foot. He leaned back and closed his eyes wearily, aware only of a hideous swirl of pain, of intolerable anxiety as to Chino's wound, and, most of all, of a mere blur of confusion wherein the sights and sounds of the last few hours tore through his brain with the plunge of a wild galloping such as seemed to have been in his ears for years and years.

But as he lay thus he heard a step at his side. Then came the touch of Felice's long brown hand upon his face. He sat up, opening his eyes.

”You aisk me-a,” she said, ”eef I do onderstaind, eh? Yais, I onderstaind. You--” her voice was a whisper--”you shoot Chino, eh? I know. You do those thing' for me-a. I am note angri, no-a. You ver'

sharp man, eh? All for love oaf Felice, eh? Now we be happi, maybe; now we git married soam day byne-by, eh? Ah, you one brave man, Signor Lockwude!”

She would have taken his hand, but Lockwood, the pain all forgot, the confusion all vanis.h.i.+ng, was on his feet. It was as though a curtain that for months had hung between him and the blessed light of clear understanding had suddenly been rent in twain by her words. The woman stood revealed. All the baseness of her tribe, all the degraded savagery of a degenerate race, all the capabilities for wrong, for sordid treachery, that lay dormant in her, leaped to life at this unguarded moment, and in that new light, that now at last she had herself let in, stood pitilessly revealed, a loathsome thing, hateful as malevolence itself.

”What,” shouted Lockwood, ”you think--think that I--that I _could_--oh-h, it's monstrous--_you_----” He could find no words to voice his loathing. Swiftly he turned away from her, the last spark of an evil love dying down forever in his breast.

It was a transformation, a thing as sudden as a miracle, as conclusive as a miracle, and with all a miracle's sense of uplift and power. In a second of time the scales seemed to fall from the man's eyes, fetters from his limbs; he saw, and he was free.

At the door Lockwood met the doctor:

”Well?”

”He's all right; only a superficial wound. He'll recover. But you--how about you? All right? Well, that is a good hearing. You've had a lucky escape, my boy.”

”I _have_ had a lucky escape,” shouted Lockwood. ”You don't know just how lucky it was.”

A BARGAIN WITH PEG-LEG