‘I shall shoot.’
She pressed her lips together.
‘I shall shoot,’ he repeated. ‘One—two—three.’
Bang, bang! He had fired twice, purposely missing her. Miss Spencer never blenched. Racksole was tremendously surprised—and he would have been a thousandfold more surprised could he have contrasted her behaviour now with her abject terror on the previous evening when Nella had threatened her.
‘You’ve got a bit of pluck,’ he said, ‘but it won’t help you. Why won’t you let us pass?’
As a matter of fact, pluck was just what she had not, really; she had merely subordinated one terror to another. She was desperately afraid of Racksole’s revolver, but she was much more afraid of something else.
‘Why won’t you let us pass?’
‘I daren’t,’ she said, with a plaintive tremor; ‘Tom put me in charge.’
That was all. The men could see tears running down her poor wrinkled face.
Theodore Racksole began to take off his light overcoat.