The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 48
CHAPTER XLVIII
The Old Adam
IT WAS as if the women had exchanged natures while they slept.
Rose threatened and Judith shrank!
The countenance that Rose showed her sister was a thunder-cloud rent by the lightning of her angry eyes. Her pose was like that of an animal set to spring. In her hand hung a revolver, and slowly the girl's grasp tightened upon the grip of the weapon and its muzzle lifted. Remarking this, a flash of her one-time temper quickened Judith.
"Well?" she taunted her sister. "Why don't you shoot?"
"What were you doing there?" Rose demanded.
"If you must know from me what you already know on the evidence of your eyes, I was bidding good-bye to the man I love, kissing him without his knowledge or consent before leaving him to you for good and all!"
"And so you leave him to me out of your charity! Is that it?"
"Any way you like. But if it's so intolerable to you to think that I dare love him and confess it to you, if you begrudge me the humiliation of stooping to kiss a man who doesn't want my kisses, if you are so afraid of losing him while I live and love him, very well, then!"
With a passionate gesture Judith tore open the bosom of her waist, offering her flesh to the muzzle of the revolver.
Just then the man at the table, startled from his sleep by the sound of angry voices, leaped from his chair with a violence that sent it clattering to the floor, and hurled himself headlong across the room, imprisoning the wrist of his betrothed with one hand while the other wrested the weapon away and passed it to Judith.
"Rose!" he cried thickly, "What does this mean? Are you mad? Judith!"
Dragging the bosom of her waist together, Judith thrust the weapon into its holster and turned away.
"Be kind to her, Alan," she said in an uncertain voice, "she didn't understand and—and I goaded her beyond endurance, I'm afraid. Forgive me—but be kind to her always."
Somehow, blindly, she stumbled out of the cabin. into the open, possessed by a thought whose temptation was stronger than her powers of resistance. She had the pistol. … None, she told herself bitterly, would seek to hinder her. … But she meant so to arrange the matter that none should see or suspect and be moved to interfere. Round the shoulder of the mountain, on the road along the edge of the cliff, she was sure of freedom from observation.
Late though the afternoon hour was, the business of hydraulic mining still engaged the undivided attention of every man in the camp. None noticed the girl as she sped up the road toward the cliff—at least, if any one did, it was without remarking the symptoms of the hysteria which was at the bottom of this mad impulse toward self-destruction.
And yet, such is the inconsistency of the human animal, the instinct for self-preservation was stronger than her purpose: when a touring-car swung round the mountain and shot toward her she jumped aside hastily to escape being run down. The next instant the machine was lurching to a halt and the sonorous accents of Seneca Trine were saluting her.
"Judith! You here! Where've you been? Where are Marrophat and Jimmy? Haven't you seen or heard anything of them? They left me at six o'clock this morning, to go after"
"Dead!" the girl interrupted, sententious, eying him strangely.
"Dead?" he echoed. "Who's dead?" A gleam of infernal joy lighted up his countenance. "You don't mean to tell me Alan Law"
"No," she cut him short. "I mean to tell you that Marrophat and Jimmy are dead."
"I don't believe it!" the old man screamed, aghast. "You're lying to me, you jade! You're lying"
"I am not," she broke in coldly. "I am telling you the plain truth. … They caught up with us here, about noon—came up this road, shooting over the windshield. It was our life or theirs. We turned the hydraulic stream on them and washed the car over the cliff. If you don't believe me, get somebody to show you their faces."
She indicated with a gesture two forms that lay at a little distance back from the roadside, motionless beneath a sheet of canvas, the bodies of Trine's creatures, recovered by the mining gang and brought up for a Christian burial.
But Trine required no more confirmation of Judith's word. The light flickered and died in his evil old eyes; and despair followed realization that he no longer owned even one friend or creature upon whose conscienceless loyalty he might depend.
This, then, was the cruel fruition of his merciless hounding of Alan Law from the woods of northern Maine to the hills of southern California! ...
The last bitter drop that brimmed his cup of misery was added when Alan Law himself appeared, leaving the miners' cabin in company with his betrothed—Rose now soothed and comforted, smiling through the traces of her recent tears as she clung to her lover, nestling in the hollow of his arm. But this sight aroused Trine.
"Drive on!" he screamed to the chauffeur. "Drive on, do you hear?"
Judith had stepped up on the running-board and was eying the driver coldly, with one hand significantly resting on the butt of the weapon at her side. The car remained at a standstill.
"Where's Barcus?" Judith demanded, when, after helping Rose into the car and running back to thank their hosts, Alan returned alone to the car.
"Goodness only knows," the young man answered cheerfully. "He would insist on rambling off down the cañon in search of an alleged town where we could hire a motor-car. I daresay we'll meet him on his way back—or else asleep somewhere by the roadside!"
Taking the seat next the chauffeur, Alan gave the word to drive on, and the car slipped away from the mining-camp, saluted by cheers from the miners.
Half an hour passed without a word being spoken by any member of the party. Each was deep in his or her own especial preoccupation, Alan turning over plans for an early wedding, Rose hugging the contentment regained through her lover's protestations, Judith lost in profoundest melancholy, Trine nursing his rage, working himself up into a silent fury whose consequences were to be more far-reaching than he dreamed.
The aged monomaniac occupied the right-hand corner of the rear seat. Thus his one able hand was next to Judith, in close juxtaposition to the revolver in the holster on her hip. Without the least warning his left hand closed upon the weapon, withdrew it, and levelled it at the back of Alan's head.
As he pulled the trigger Judith flung herself bodily upon the arm. Even so, the bullet found a goal, though in another than the intended victim. The muscular forearm of the chauffeur received it. With a shriek of pain the man released the wheel and grasped his arm.
Before Alan could move to prevent the disaster the car, running without a guiding hand, cannoned off a low embankment to the left and shot full-tilt into a shallow ditch on the right, shelling its passengers like peas from a broken pod. Alan catapulted a good twenty feet through the air and alighted with such force that he lay stunned for several moments.
When he came to he found Barcus helping him to his feet, a heavy seven-passenger touring-car halted in the roadway indicated the manner in which his friend had arrived on the scene of the accident. When damages were assessed it was found that none of the party had suffered seriously but the chauffeur and Seneca Trine himself. The former had only his wound to show, however, while Trine lay still and senseless at a considerable distance from the wrecked automobile.
Nothing but a barely perceptible respiration and an intermittently fluttering pulse persuaded them that the flame of life was not extinct in that poor, old, pain-racked and twisted body.