"Ah! Mr. Ticehurst," he said slowly, "you know me? You look as if you did. I am glad you feel like that. You are afraid!"
I looked at him and answered:
"It is a lie!"
And from that time forward it was a lie, for I feared no more.
"No," he said, "I think not; you are pale, and just now you shook. I don't shake, even after what I have been through. Look at me!"
He pointed his weapon at me, and his hand was as steady as a rock. He lowered it again and stroked the barrel softly with his lean left hand.
"You remember what I said to you," he went on, "don't you, Thomas Ticehurst? I do, and I have kept my word. Ah! I have thought of this many times, many times. They tortured me and treated me like a dog in the jail you sent me to; they beat me, and kicked me, and starved me, but I never complained, lest my time there should be longer. And when I lay down at night I thought of the time when I should kill you. I knew it would come, and it has. But just now, when I saw you by the side of your own grave, looking down, I didn't know whether it was you or the other man, and I thought perhaps he had killed you. If it had been he, I would have killed him."
He paused, and I still stood there with a flood of thoughts rushing through me. What should I do? If he had taken his eyes off mine for but one single moment I would have sprung on him; but he did not, and while he talked, I heard the horses champing their bits in the brush. And cruelest of all, my own horse moved, and put his head through the branches and looked at me. Oh, if I were only on his back! But I did not speak.
"How shall I kill you?" said Matthias at last; "I would like to cut you to pieces!"
He paused again, and then another horse that I had not yet seen moved on the other side of the trail where he had come up. It had heard the others, and I knew it must be the animal he had ridden. It came out of the brush into the light of the fire, and I knew it was Elsie's. My heart gave a tremendous leap, and then stood still. How had he become possessed of it? I spoke, and in a voice I could not recognize as my own, so hoarse and terrible it was.
"How did you get that white horse, you villain?" I asked.
He looked at me fiercely without at first seeing how he could hurt me, and then a look of beast-like, cruel cunning came into his eyes.
"Ah!" said he, "I knew her! It was your girl's horse! How did I get it? Perhaps you would like to know? You will never see her again—never! Where is she now—where?"
He knew as little as I did, but the way he spoke, and the horrible things he put into his voice, made me boil with fury.
"You are a lying dog!" I cried, though he had said nothing that I should be so wrathful. He grinned diabolically, seeing how he had hurt me, and then laughed loud in an insulting, triumphant manner. It was too much, and I made one tremendous bound across the fire, and landed within three feet of him. He fired at the same moment, and whether he had wounded me or not I did not know; but the revolver went spinning two yards off, and we grappled in a death-hug.
I have said that Siwash Jim was a hard man to beat, but whether it was that I was weak with my wound or not, I found Matthias, who was mad with hate and fury, the most terrible antagonist I had ever tackled. He was as slippery as an eel, as lithe as a snake, and withal his grip was like that of a steel trap. Yet if I could but prevent him drawing his knife, which was at his belt, I did not care. I was his match if not in agility, at least in strength, and I would never let him go. We were for one moment still, after we grappled, and I trust I shall never see anything that looks more like a devil than his eyes, in which the light of the fire shone, while he gnashed his teeth and ground them until the foam and saliva oozed out of his mouth like a mad dog's venom. His forehead was seamed and wrinkled, his cheeks were sucked in and then blown out convulsively, and his whole aspect was more hideous than that of a beast of prey. And then the struggle began.
At first it was a trial of strength, for although I was so much the bigger, he knew his own power and the force of his iron nerves, and he hoped to overcome me thus. We reeled to and fro, and twice went through the fire, where I once held him for an instant with a malicious joy that was short-lived, for the pain added to his strength, and he forced me backward, until I struck the trunk of the tree a heavy blow. Then we swayed hither and thither, for I had him by the right wrist and the left shoulder, not daring to alter my grip on his right hand, lest he should get his knife. He held me in the same way, and at last we came to the very verge of the cañon, and spurned the tracks that Jim had made in his agony. For a moment I thought he would throw us both in, but he had not lost hope. If he had, that moment would have been my last. In another second we had staggered to the fire, and he tried all his strength to free his right hand. At last, by a sudden wrench he did it, and dropped his fingers like lightning on his knife, just as I bent his left wrist over, and struck him in the face with his own clenched hand. We both went down; his knife ripped my shoulder by the very place that Jim's bullet had struck, and we rolled over and over madly and blindly, burning ourselves on the scattered embers, tearing ourselves on the jagged roots and small branches, which we smashed, as I strove to dash him on the ground, and he struggled to free his arm, which I had gripped above the elbow, to end the battle at one blow. But though he once drove the point more than an inch into the biceps, and three times cut me deeply, he did not injure any nerve so as to paralyse the limb. And yet I felt that I was becoming insensible, so tremendous was the strain and the excitement, and I felt that I must make a last effort, or die. Somehow we rose to our knees, still grappling, and if I looked a tithe as horrible as he did, covered with blood, saliva, and sweat, I must have been horrible to see. We glared in each other's eyes for one moment, and then, loosing my hold on his left arm, I caught his right wrist with both hands. With his freed hand he struck me with all his remaining strength full in the face while I twisted his right wrist with a force that should have broken it, but which only compelled him to relinquish the bloody piece of steel. And then we rolled over again, and lay locked in each other's arms. There was a moment's truce, for human nature could not stand the strain. But I think he believed I was beaten, and at his mercy, for he was on top of me, lying half across my breast, with his face not six inches from mine. He spoke in a horrible voice, that shook with hate and pain and triumph.
"I've got you now—and I'll kill you, as I did your brother!"
Great God! then it was he who had done it, after all. Better had it been for him to have held his peace, for that word roused me again as nothing else could have done, and I caught his throat with both hands, though he struck me viciously. I held him as he lay on top of me, and saw him die. Then I knew no more for a little while, and as I lay there insensible, I still bled.
What was it that called me to myself? Whether it was that my soul had gone out to meet someone, and returned in triumph, for I awoke with a momentary feeling of gladness; or whether it was an unconscious effort of the brain, in the presence of a new and terrible danger, I cannot say. All I know is that, when that spasm of joy passed, I felt weak and unable to move under the weight of Matthias, whose protruding eyes and tongue mocked at me hideously in death, as though his revenge was even now being accomplished; and I saw the fiery brush creeping across the space that lay between me and the fire Jim had kindled at my bidding. Was I to die by fire at the last, when that horrible night was passing and the dawn was already breaking on the eastern horizon? For I could not stir, my limbs were like lead, my heart beat feebly, and my feet were cold. I lay glaring at the fire, and, as I did so, I saw that the revolver I had struck out of Matthias's hand was lying as far from the fire as the fire was from me. How is it that there is such a clear intellect at times in the very presence of death? I saw then that the shots I had fired from that weapon had brought my enemy up just in time, for otherwise he might have been wearied out or lost; and now I thought if I could only get to it, to fire it, I might thus bring help: for what enemies had I left now save the crawling fire? I might even bring Elsie. But then, how did the dead villain who lay across me, choking me still, get her horse, and what had happened to her in his hands! I tried to scream, and I sighed as softly as the vague wind which was impelling the slow fires toward me. How near they came!—how near—and nearer yet, like serpents rearing their heads, spitting viciously as they came? And then I thought how slow they were; why did they not come and end it at once, and let me die? And I looked at the fires again. They were within two feet of me, I could feel the heat, and within eighteen inches of the revolver. I was glad, and watched it feverishly. But then the weapon's muzzle was pointed almost at me. Suppose it exploded, and shot me dead as it called for help! How strange it was! I put up my hands feebly and tried to move the dead body, so as to screen myself. I might as well have tried to uproot a tree, for I could barely move my hands. I looked at the fire again as it crawled on and on, now wavering, now staying one moment to lift up its thousand little crests and vicious eyes, and then stooping to lick up the grass and the dried brush on which I lay. But as I glared at it intently, at last it reached the weapon, and coiled round it triumphantly as though that had been its goal, licking it round and round. Would the flames heat the cartridges enough, and if they did, where would the bullets go? I asked that deliriously, for I was in a fever, and instead of being cold at heart, the blood ran through me like fire. I thought I began to feel the fire that was so close to me. I heard the explosion of the heated weapon. I was yet alive. "Come, Elsie! come, if you are not dead—come and save me—come!" I thought I cried out loudly, but not even her ear, that heard a sharper sound afar, could have caught that. Once more and once again the cartridges fired, and I heard a crash, saw a horse burst like a flame through the black brush, and there was a white thing before my eyes. I looked up and saw Elsie, my own true love after all, and then I fainted dead away, and did not recover until long, long after.
I ask myself sometimes even now, when those hours that were burnt into my soul return to my sight like an old brand coming out on the healed flesh when it is struck sudden and sharply, whether, after all, my enemy had been balked of his revenge. To die one death and go into oblivion is the lot of all who face the rising sun, and, after a while, veil their eyes when its last fires sink in the western sea. But I suffered ten thousand deaths by violence, by cruel ambush and torture, by crawling flames and flashing knives in the interval between my rescue and my recovery from the fever that my wounds and the horror of it all brought upon me. They told me—Elsie herself told me—that I lay raving only ten days; but it seemed incredible to me, as I shook my head in a vague disbelief that made them fear for my reason. If I had been in the care of strangers who were unfamiliar to me, I might have thought myself a worn-out relic of some dead and buried era, whose monuments had crumbled slowly to ashes in the very fires through which my soul had passed, shrieking for the forgetful dead I had loved. But though I saw her only vaguely like a spirit in clouds, or knew her, without sight as I lay half unconscious, as a beneficent presence only, I grew gradually to feel that Elsie, who still lived after the centuries of my delirium, loved me with the passion I had felt for her. I sayhadfelt, for I was like a child, and my desire for her was scarcely more than a pathetic longing for tenderness of thought and touch, until the great strength which had been my pride returned in a flood and brought passion with it once more.
How strangely that came to pass which I had foretold in my last talk with Elsie! I had said, angrily—for I was angered—that she should one day speak to me, though she swore she would not, and that she should implore my pardon. And she did it, she who had been so strong and self-contained, in the meekest and dearest way the thoughts of a maiden could devise. And then she asked me if I would marry her? Would I marry her? I stared at her in astonishment, not at her asking, for it seemed the most natural thing in the world for her to do, but at the idiocy of the Question. "I do believe you love me, Elsie," I said at last, "for I have heard that love makes the most sensible people quite stupid. If you were in your right senses, dear, you would not have asked it——"
"I should think not, indeed!" she broke in. But she smiled tenderly.
"Because you know very well that I settled that long enough ago, on board theVancouver," I said stoutly.
"Then I had no voice in it?" Elsie said.
"Not the least, I assure you! I made up my mind."
"And so did I," said Elsie, softly.
"What do you mean, dear?"
She leant her head against my shoulder, and against my big beard, and whispered:
"I made up my mind, dear Tom, that if you didn't love me, I would never love anyone else, but go and be a nun or a nurse all my life. And that's why I was so hard, you know!"
Yes, I knew that well enough.
And where was Helen, meantime? I am drawing so near the end of my story that I must say what I have to in a few words. She had remained at the ranch until the doctor had declared I was going to recover (it was no fault of his that I did), and then she went away. What she told Elsie I have never known, nor shall I ever ask; but they parted good friends—yes, the best of friends—and she returned home to Melbourne. I never saw her again, at least not to my knowledge, although once, when Elsie and I were both in that city—for I returned to my profession—I thought, nay, for the moment I made sure, that she had come to know of our presence there. For Elsie had presents of fruit and flowers almost every day she was at Melbourne. I part with her now with a strange regret, and somehow I have never confessed to anyone that I was very vexed at her not waiting until I was well enough to recognize her before she went. For, you see, she loved me.
But—and this is the last—the time came when I was able to go out with Elsie and Fanny, and though we rode slowly, it did not need rapid motion to exhilarate me when she was by my side. As for Fanny, she used to lose us in the stupidest way, just as if she had not been brought up in the bush, and been able to follow a trail like a black fellow. But when Harmer came out on Sundays, it was we who lost them, for Fanny used to go off at full speed, while Jack, who never got used to a horse for many months, used to risk his neck to keep up with her. Then she used to annoy him at night by offering him the softest seat, which he stoutly refused, preferring to suffer untold tortures on a wooden stool, rather than confess. But I don't think they will ever imitate us, who got married at last in the autumn at Thomson Forks. I invited almost everyone I knew to the wedding, and I made Mac my chief man, much to Jack's disgust. I would even have invited Montana Bill, but he was lying in the hospital with a bullet in his shoulder; while Hank Patterson could not come on account of the police wanting him for putting it there. But half the population of the Forks had bad headaches next day; and if I didn't have to wear my right hand in a sling on account of the shaking it got, it was because I was as strong as ever. The only man who looked unhappy was Mr. Fleming, and he certainly had a right to be miserable, considering that I had robbed him of his housekeeper, leaving him to the tender mercies of flighty Fanny. And she was so vicious to poor Jack that he actually dared to say to me, "that if Elsie had the temper of her sister, he was sorry for me, and that it was a pity Siwash Jim and Mat had made a mess of it." When I rebuked him, he said merrily, "he guessed it was a free country, and not the poop of theVancouver." So I let him alone, being quite convinced then, and I have never changed my opinion since, though we have been married almost five years, that Elsie Ticehurst is the best wife a man ever had, and worth fighting for, even against the world.
THE END