“You will not?” The words came in a low, strenuous, menacing voice that fitted with her tigress look.
“No, I will not;” and at that, without another word, she flung herself upon me, wrought up to such a pitch of madness in her reckless yearning to do the deed she had come to do upon Kolfort that she would have plunged the knife into my heart to clear me out of her path. She struggled with the strength and frenzy of madness, turning the knife as I clutched and held her wrist until it gashed my hand, while she strained every nerve and muscle of her lithe, active body in the desperate efforts to get past me and wrench her wrist from my grip.
She was now in all truth a madwoman.
It was a grim, fierce, gruesome struggle, for her strength was at all times far beyond that of a woman, and her mania increased it until I could scarce hold her in check. Had I been a less powerful man she would certainly have beaten me; but I thrust her away again, though I could not get the dagger from her, and was preparing myself for a renewal of the struggle, when, with a scream for help that resounded through the house, she turned her wild eyes on me, now gleaming with her madness, and hissed:
“He seeks the proofs to kill you! He shall have them in my dead body! My blood is on you! My murder shall give him the proofs he needs!”
She cried again for help in the same ear-piercing screech; and, before I could devise her meaning, she turned the blade against herself, plunged it into her own heart, and, with a last half-finished scream, fell to the floor with a sickening thud.
In an instant I saw the method in her madness. The General had seen me in the room; he was now unconscious; there was no witness of her self-murder; my hand was streaming with the blood from the gashes of her knife; it was in my house it happened; her screams for help must have been heard outside. The suggestive proofs that I had slain her were enough to convince anyone of my guilt, and in another moment I should have the General’s men thundering at the door, not only to stop my flight, but to have me denounced as a murderer.
Surely never was a man in a more desperate plight, and for the moment I knew not in my desperation what to do.
A glance at General Kolfort showed me he was still unconscious, and I rushed to him and shook him in the frenzy of my despair. But he gave no sign of returning consciousness, and the white face rolled from side to side as the head shook nervelessly on the limp, flaccid neck.
I clenched my hands and breathed hard in my concentrated efforts to think coherently and form some plan of action, and I cursed aloud in my wrath the fiend of a woman who had brought me to this pass of peril. I had no thought for her, dead though she was, but wild, raging, impotent hate.