"Good God, man!" cried Murray, getting up on one elbow. "You can't mean——"
Scudder put out a foot and shoved him back again.
"Lie put, will you?" he chuckled. "Wait till I get this syringe filled, and by the time Claire comes back, you'll be past speech! And you won't speak to her again until I'm ready to let you."
While he spoke, Scudder filled the syringe, and adjusted a needle. Then, the syringe in his hand, he came and stood over Murray.
"Struggling won't do you any good," he said, and bent down.
Murray struck at him—struck weakly and vainly. Scudder seized his right wrist and drew it down—put it under his foot and held it there. Then he seized Murray's left arm, gripped the wrist, and drew it up to meet the syringe.
"Now for happyland!" he said. "One slight prick——"
He paused suddenly—paused and jerked himself upright, a flood of color sweeping into his pale features as his head came up. From the clumps of manzanita twenty feet away, had come a voice.
"Hold on, Scudder!"
And from that covert of twisting, grotesque, blood-red manzanita trees, stepped Tom Lee. Murray felt something of the fright that had seized upon Scudder, for the presence of Tom Lee seemed nothing short of an apparition.
"I waited for this, Scudder!" rang out the voice of the yellow man, his eyes fastened upon the horrified gaze of Scudder. "When you gave me all that dope last night, I guessed that you were coming here; I discovered that you had planted the stuff in Doctor Murray's suitcase, I had begun to penetrate your wiles and deviltry! Now it's ended."
Tom Lee came forward. Before him, Scudder shrank. The syringe dropped from his nerveless fingers; he stepped back from the figure of Murray, retreated from the advancing form of Tom Lee in visible terror and consternation.
"You devil!" cried the oriental, a deep and surging passion filling his voice. "I came here last night in Hennesy's car—I've been waiting for you! I heard all your lies, heard all your plotted deviltry. You thought you'd dispose of Murray and have Claire in your power, didn't you?"
There was reason for the sheer terror that filled Scudder. The face of the advancing man had changed into a frightful mask; it had changed and altered into the face of the great stone Buddha that watches over the Yungmen caves—it had become a purely Asian face, filled with terrible and deadly things, unguessed menaces.
Murray painfully got to one elbow again and watched. The others were oblivious of him; all their attention was fastened upon each other. Still Scudder retreated, and still Tom Lee advanced upon him, weaponless, yet in his advance a potent and fearful threat. Before that threat, Scudder still retreated, his face ghastly.
"Damn you!" he cried, his voice shrill. "What d'ye mean by all this——?"
"You can't get away from me," said Tom Lee impassively. "I'm going to have a reckoning with you."
"No, but I can stop your game!" retorted Scudder with an oath. The mask was gone now, and he cursed luridly. "You can't run any damned Chinese bluff on me——"
With the words, he plucked a revolver from his pocket and fired.
The shot echoed and reëchoed in the cañon. Tom Lee did not move. Scudder glared up at him and made as if to lift the weapon again, then he hurled it from him with another curse, and kicked at something on the sand at his feet. A shrill scream broke from him. Something fell away from his kick—an incoherent, feeble object that slipped to the sand and blended there, shapeless and invisible; a stark-blind thing, a living volute of death and venom—a rattler, that had struck blind, but that had struck home!
With that scream still on his lips, Scudder whirled about and began to run. He fled, as though after him pursued some invisible and awful thing. He ran blindly down the valley as though in search of something, desperate in his extremity; he passed the automobile in which he had come, running, stumbling through the soft sand. And so out of sight around the twist in the cañon.
"Let him go! It is finished."
The words came from Tom Lee. He turned to Murray, smiling, and the smile seemed fastened in his face. He lifted his arm, and looked at the hand, curiously. A cry broke from Murray, for the hand was streaming with a scarlet fluid.
Abruptly, Tom Lee pitched forward and lay in a heap, just as Claire, called by the shot, appeared.
A flivver that bore two men, came crawling down the slope of the desert-rim in the early morning. Near the approach to Morongo Valley, it halted. The two men alighted to inspect a heap in the sand, from which a carrion bird flapped heavily away. They looked at the body, glanced at each other, then silently got into the car and continued their journey.
"Rattler, I judge," observed Sandy Mackintavers. "And a good job."
The car crept up the valley to the shack, stopped, coughed, and became silent. Murray was awaiting it, pale and weak but walking; beside him was Claire, and joining them was Tom Lee, his right arm in a sling.
Murray's face lighted up, and his hand shot out.
"Willyum!" he cried delightedly. "We thought we must be dreaming when we saw you! And Sandy too—but I thought you were behind the bars!"
Across the earnest features of Bill Hobbs broke a rippling light of gleeful mirth.
"Say!" he exclaimed, while he pumped Murray's hand. "Say, I gotta hand it to that sheriff for bein' a prize boob! I was wanted all right—three years ago! Since then, I done the time an' got out again, see? When the answer come to his wire, that was the sickest guy you ever seen! But say, Doc, how are you?"
"Fine! Coming around all right." Murray's gaze went to Sandy Mackintavers. "What stroke of luck turned you loose, Sandy?"
The voice of Tom Lee interposed, with a chuckle.
"That was my doing, gentlemen," he said blandly. "The contractor, Hennesy, preferred to withdraw all charges against Mr. Mackintavers, to losing my contract. And, Mr. Mackintavers! I wish you'd come up the hill here. There's something I want to show you."
Sandy nodded and joined him, and the two men ascended toward the seepage where Murray had lain.
Bill Hobbs looked from the face of the girl, alight with a strange happiness, to the incisive, quizzical eyes of Murray. He seemed to sense a constraint, flushed slightly, and was turning away when Murray's hand halted him.
"Hold on there, Willyum! I'm glad, old man, very glad, that everything's clear for you! By the way, I've an item of news for your paper. You know what I told you about the sanitarium? Well, Mr. Lee is going ahead with his plans, and I'm to be in charge——"
"Say!" broke out Hobbs with sudden remembrance. "What happened to Scudder? We seen him out yonder, and Mac laid it to a rattler."
"Mac was right, I suppose," said Murray, thoughtfully. "Although I'm not so sure that it wasn't the hand of Providence, Willyum. But lay it to the rattler and play safe. He shot Tom Lee through the arm before the rattler got him; he sure had panic, blind panic! And, by the way, I have another item of news for you——"
Murray glanced at Claire, who smiled happily. "Miss Lee," he pursued, "has decided to chance being the wife of a country doctor."
A shout from the hillside drew their attention. Tom Lee was standing beside Claire's camp, and out of the seepage of water near by, shouting and waving his hands, was Sandy—dirty, streaked with sand and water, adrip with perspiration and exultancy.
"Aiblins, now, will ye look at this!" He pointed to the seepage, a blaze of excitement lighting his face.
"We see it," answered Murray, laughing. "What's the matter with it?"
"Matter with it?" shouted Sandy, waving his arm at the brow of the hill. "Free gold, that's what! It'll take us smack into rotten quartz, that's what!"
A little later, Bill Hobbs, standing by his automobile, rolled a cigarette.
"Aw!" he muttered to himself. "Aw, gee! And now I gotta go back to the printshop and work all alone with that old derelict—and Sandy's gotta work all alone at the mine—aw, gee! Ain't it hell how a woman busts up everything! I wisht I was a poor man again!"