He could see Durkin’s preparatory jaw-clench.
“You—you wouldn’t get mixed up in cold murder like this!” MacNutt half pleaded, hurriedly and huskily, with his eyes now on the other man’s. “Why, you’d swing for it, Durkin! You’d go to the chair!”
Durkin uttered a foul name, impatiently, and closed out the picture with his shut eyelids as he thrust his right hand forward and down.
He wondered, with lightning-like rapidity of thought, if the blood would stain his hand.
Then he felt a quick bark, and a sudden great spit of pain shot through him.
The gun had exploded, he told himself dreamily, as he staggered to the wall and leaned there weakly, swaying back and forth. But why didn’t MacNutt go down? he asked himself unconcernedly, as he watched with dull eyes where a jet of red blood spurted and pumped regularly from somewhere in his benumbed forearm.
Then he had a thin and far-away vision of Frances, with a smoking revolver in her hand, drifting out from the other room. He seemed to see her floating out, like a bird on the wing almost, to where his own weapon lay, and catch it up, as MacNutt or some vague shadow of him, leaped to put a heavy foot on it.
A hundred miles away, seemingly, he heard her voice in a thin and high treble telling MacNutt to go, or she would shoot him there herself, like a dog.
Succeeding this came a sense of falling, and he found something bound tightly round his arm, and a new dull and throbbing pain as this something twisted and twisted and grew still tighter on the benumbed flesh. Then he felt the weight of a body leaning on his own, where he lay there, and a hand trying to fondle his face and hair.
“Oh, Jim, Jim!” the thin and far-away voice seemed to be wailing, “oh, Jim, I had to do it! I had to—to save you from yourself! You would have killed him. . . . You would have shot him dead. . . . And that would be the end of everything. . . . Don’t you understand, my beloved own?”