THE SACRIFICE
Vicky floated back to consciousness and a world that for a moment did not relate itself to her previous experience. Hugh McClintock’s arms were round her, his anxious face looking into hers. The touch of the night wind was in the air, and apparently she was lying on the ground.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“You fainted,” he explained.
“Oh!” she said vaguely. Then her eyes fell upon the still body stretched beside her. Her memory picked up lost threads again and she shuddered. “I—I thought—it was you.” She clung to him, her arms round him, as though she had not yet fully escaped from the horror that had held her.
“Thought it was me?” he said, and there was not such a thing as grammar in the world just then. “Why should you think that?”
“They meant to—to—kill you. One of my little boys heard them.” She began to sob softly into his coat.
Hugh’s arms tightened about her. His body glowed with a soft warm happiness. He had never known Vicky before unstrung and helpless. It was golden luck for him that he should be the man to whom she clung.
“How could they know I’d be here?” he asked gently.
“Didn’t you get a note? Bob Dodson wrote it.”
“A decoy, to bring me here?”
“Yes. They pretended it was from me.”
She disengaged herself from his arms. The instinct of sex defence against even the favoured lover was reasserting itself.
Hugh tried to put the bits of the puzzle together. His eyes fell upon the dead body at his feet. “Then—this man—they must have shot him in place of me.”
“Yes,” her dry throat gasped out.
McClintock stooped to feel the heart. It did not beat. He turned the body for a look at the face. Then, “God!” he cried.
The face that stared up at him with sightless eyes was the face of Ralph Dodson.
Vicky wailed in distress. “Oh, Hugh! I did it. I killed him! I brought him here.”
“How? What do you mean?”
She caught her hands together in a gesture of despair. “I sent Tommie for him—told him to come. I wanted him to save you.”
Hugh looked down at the face of the man who had hated him so bitterly. His face muscles twitched. He was greatly touched.
“He died in my place—to save me,” he said gently.
“No. I didn’t tell him what I wanted him for—only that I wanted him right away. And he came—and——” She broke down utterly. Innocently she had been the cause of the death of a man who loved her. Without thought she had lured him into the ambush his own brother had prepared for his enemy.
The arms that went round her were those of Old Dog Tray and not those of her lover. Hugh comforted her as best he could.
“You’re not to blame—not in the least. The men who contrived my murder are guilty of his death. You called on him for help. That’s all. He had lots of sand. Even if he had known what would happen to him he would have come to you. That’s the way game men are. They go through. If he were here and could speak to you he wouldn’t blame you—not a bit of it. He’d say it was just the luck of the day.”
“Yes, but—but——”
His voice went on, cheerful, even, matter of fact. The very sound of it banished despair. Her sobs diminished.
He led her to his horse.
“What—what’ll we do with—him?” she asked.
“I’ll arrange that when I get to town,” he told her.
Hugh made a foot rest of his hand and Vicky climbed to the saddle. He walked along the path beside her.
Once his hand went up comfortingly to find and press hers in the darkness.
She whispered, in a small voice she could not make quite steady, “You’re so good to me.”
He did not answer. What could he say, except that if it would help her he would cheerfully let red Indians torture him? And that somehow did not seem an appropriate reply.