Steve took a step forward and held his arms out to her. “Will you let me speak to you alone for one minute, Ess?” he said. Even in that faint light she could see something of his sunken eyes and haggard cheeks. But she could see also his half-dressed appearance, his feet thrust into unlaced boots, the jacket flung over his shoulders without a shirt beneath, and the meaning was driven home to her by Ned Gunliffe’s words—“Aren’t we keeping you from your—from the woman you have just left?” he said sneeringly.
Steve swung round on him with a bitter oath and jerked a revolver from his pocket. “Get back,” he snapped at him; “get back, you hound, or I’ll shoot you as you stand. D’you think I can’t see your hand in this? D’you think I don’t see the game you’re playing?”
He took another step forward, but Ess stepped to meet him.
“He is going,” she said, “and I am going with him. He is right, and we are keeping you from—from her.”
She laid a bitter emphasis on the last word, and at that his rage caught fire from hers and flared through him like flame through a dead gum.
“Then go with him,” he snarled, “and let him keep you if he can. He’ll find it hard to do, if you shed all your loves as easy as you shed mine.”
Her anger twisted his words to even more than they were ever meant. “Keep me,” she panted, “you hound——” and lifted the whip she carried and struck him full across the face. “Do you think all men and women are light-o’loves like yourself? He has asked me to marry him, and although I did not answer before, I’ll answer him now—Yes, if he will have one who has soiled herself to think she ever loved you.”
And now the leaping flame of his rage died down and hid itself behind light and mocking words, even as the searing red heart of the fire cloaks itself under light and feathery ash.
He stood and looked at her for ten long heart-beats, and then his taut figure slacked, he half turned and lounged back a step, and threw his head up with a mocking laugh.
“So-ho, that’s it?” he cried. “You turn the trick then, Ned? I congratulate you on the win—if not on the way you played the hand.”