She wheeled, as though about to spring on him.
"I will! I will, although I wither between gaol walls for it—although I die for it! I'm no weak and foolish woman! I've known life bald to the bone; I've fought and schemed and plotted and twisted all my days almost, and I can die doing it! And if you kill this man, if you murder him—for it is murder!—if you bring this dog's death on him, I will make you pay for it, in one way or another—I'll make you mourn it, David MacNutt, as you've made me mourn the first day I ever saw your face!"
She was in a blind and unreasoning passion of vituperative malevolence by this time, her face drawn and withered with fear, her eyes luminous, in the dungeon-like half-lights, with the inner fire of her hate.
"Keep cool, my dear, keep cool!" mocked MacNutt, without a trace of trepidation at all her vague threats. "Durkin's not dead yet!"
She caught madly at the slender thread of hope which swung from his mockery.
"No! No, he's not dead yet, and he'll die hard! He's no fool—you've found that out in the past! He will give you a fight before he goes, in some way, for he's fought you and beaten you from the first—and he'll beat you again—I know he'll beat you again!"
Her voice broke and merged into a paroxysm of sobbing, and MacNutt looked at her bent and shaken figure with meditative coldness.
"He may have beaten me, once, long ago—but he'll never do it again. He won't even go out fightin'! He'll go with his head hangin' and his nose down, like a sneak! And you'll see him go, for you'll be tied there, with a gag in your pretty red mouth, and you'll neither move nor speak. And there'll be no light, unless he gets so reckless as to strike a match. But when the light does come, my dear, it'll be a flash o' blue flame, with a smell o' something burnin'!"
The woman covered her face with her hands, and swayed back and forth where she stood.
Then MacNutt held back his guttural laugh, suddenly, for she had fallen forward on her face, in a dead faint.