“You—murderin’—hound!” she choked. “You’ve kilt him!”
CHAPTER IV
THE FUGITIVE
Dumb, Douglas leaned his gun against the wall and moved outward.
“Don’t you touch him!” blazed Marion. “Don’t you put a hand onto him or I’ll—I’ll use that gun onto you! I might have knowed you was lyin’—if I’d knowed Steve was out I’d never trusted a word you said. Now you’ve got him, leave him to be buried where he was borned. Oh, Steve, Stevie lad! And I—I give this feller the word to git his gun and do for you! If I’d only knowed you was out! Oh, Stevie boy!”
In a storm of grief she dropped her head on the thin chest, hugging the limp lad to her with convulsive strength. A few feet away the blond man halted, dazed by the unintentional tragedy and the violence of the girl’s outburst. For minutes he stood there motionless, hardly grasping the significance of her denunciation.
Then his brain began to work. Her words, repeating themselves, became appallingly plain. This young Steve was “out”—and his swarthy pallor was not merely that of unconsciousness or death: it was that of long confinement in some place whence he had just escaped—a place where hair was kept cropped. And he, Douglas Hampton, who had been half accepted by this girl as the chance camper he claimed to be, now had become in her mind a far blacker monster than a mere “detective”—a merciless bloodhound who killed poor fugitives on sight. Gazing miserably on the mountain maid mourning her luckless boy lover, he found the sight unendurable. His head drooped, and his eyes rested unseeing on the stones between him and the pathetic pair.
Up overhead fluttered the yellowhammers, scared by the shot but emboldened by the ensuing silence to wheel about and whet their curiosity in scrutiny of the tragic group on the stones. High on the cliff behind, an unseen squirrel fussed and fumed; and from crack and cranny along the wall and from crevices among the fallen fragments more than one furtive little eye peered out. Steadily the sun slipped upward in the clean blue sky, lighting up in pitiless nakedness one more spectacle such as it had seen all too often in the long stretch of time since men first penetrated into this grim gulf. The wretched man neither heard nor saw any of these things. Stone-still he stood, staring down at a spattered splotch of white on a gray rock.
All at once his blank gaze focused sharply on that white spot. He started. In one stride he was beside the rock. As he stooped and squinted, a light flamed in his face. With a bound he was up and leaping toward the limp form beyond.
“Git away!” shrilled Marion, lifting a tear-swollen face and turning on him like a tigress. “Keep your bloody hands off him—he’s mine! My onliest——”
“Listen to me!” he commanded. “I never hit him! The shot struck that stone yonder—the whole charge! It was an accident anyway—and he was out of line—the shot couldn’t hit him from where I stood. Let me see that wound.”