Part 53 (2/2)

The jewels blazed in the firelight. He touched them, moved them about, picked up several and examined them, testing the unset edges against his under lip as an expert tests jade.

But he couldn't tell; there was no knowing. He replaced them, closed the case, pocketed it. When he had a chance he could try boiling water for one sort of trick. He could scratch one or two.... Sard would know.

He wondered whether Sard had got away, not concerned except selfishly.

However, there were others in Paris whom he could trust--at a price....

Quintana rested both elbows on his knees and framed his dark face between both bony hands.

What a chase Clinch had led him after the Flaming Jewel. And now Clinch lay dead in the forest--faintly smiling. At _what_?

In a very low, pa.s.sionless voice, Quintana cursed monotonously as he gazed into the fire. In Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, he cursed Clinch. After a little while he remembered Clinch's daughter, and he cursed her, elaborately, thoroughly, wis.h.i.+ng her black mischance awake and asleep, living or dead.

Darragh, too, he remembered in his curses, and did not slight him. And the trooper, Stormont--ah, he should have killed all of them when he had the chance.... And those two Baltic Russians, also, the girl d.u.c.h.ess and her friend. Why on earth hadn't he made a clean job of it?

Over-caution. A wary disinclination to stir up civilization by needless murder. But after all, old maxims, old beliefs, old truths are the best, G.o.d knows. The dead don't talk! And that's the wisest wisdom of all.

”If,” murmured Quintana fervently, ”G.o.d gives me further opportunity to acquire a little property to comfort me in my old age, I shall leave no gossiping fool to do me harm with his tongue. No! I kill.

”And though they raise a hue and cry, dead tongues can not wag and I save myse'f much annoyance in the end.”

He leaned his back against the trunk of a ma.s.sive pine.

Presently Quintana slept after his own fas.h.i.+on--that is to say, looking closely at him one could discover a glimmer under his lowered eyelids.

And he listened always in that kind of sleep. As though a shadowy part of him were detached from his body, and mounted guard over it.

The inaudible movement of a wood-mouse venturing into the firelit circle awoke Quintana. Again a dropping leaf amid distant birches awoke him.

Such things. And so he slept with wet feet to the fire and his rifle across his knees; and dreamed of Eve and of murder, and that the Flaming Jewel was but a ma.s.s of gla.s.s.

At that moment the girl of whose white throat Quintana was dreaming, and whining faintly in his dreams, stood alone outside Clinch's Dump, rifle in hand, listening, fighting the creeping dread that touched her slender body at times--seemed to touch her very heart with frost.

Clinch's men had gone on to Ghost Lake with their wounded and dead, where there was fitter shelter for both. All had gone on; n.o.body remained to await Clinch's home-coming except Eve Strayer.

Black Care, that tireless squire of dames, had followed her from the time she had left Clinch, facing the spectral forests of Drowned Valley.

An odd, unusual dread weighted her heart--something in emotions that she never before had experienced in time of danger. In it there was the deathly unease of premonition. But of what it was born she did not understand,--perhaps of the strain of dangers pa.s.sed--of the shock of discovery concerning Smith's ident.i.ty with Darragh--Darragh!--the hated kinsman of Harrod the abhorred.

Fiercely she wondered how much her lover knew about this miserable masquerade. Was Stormont involved in this deception--Stormont, the object of her first girl's pa.s.sion--Stormont, for whom she would have died?

Wretched, perplexed, fiercely enraged at Darragh, deadly anxious concerning Clinch, she had gone about cooking supper.

The supper, kept warm on the range, still awaited the man who had no more need of meat and drink.

Of the tragedy of Sard Eve knew nothing. There were no traces save in the disorder in the pantry and the bottles and chair on the veranda.

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