“I wonder what has become of Nell?” was his next mental query.
As if in answer, when he looked again he saw her tip-toeing in shoeless feet toward the man who lay in front of the door of his prison. Her thin face seemed unnaturally white and bloodless in the dim light. Her widely distended eyes gleamed like those of some wild animal. In her right hand she held something, which he soon made out to be a knife.
A sense of bewildered fascination fell on Bruce. He forgot the thumping pain in his head and the ache in his shoulder.
“She is going to kill him as he sleeps!” was the horrible thought that seized him.
He moved uneasily, and put out his bound hands, as if to beg her not to do a thing so dreadful. He might have done more, but at that moment her eyes met his. She saw that he was conscious, and put a finger to her lips to enjoin silence.
Browning lay back and stared at her. His mind was not yet entirely clear.
Again she put her fingers across her lips, and took another catlike step toward the sleeping man.
She made no more sound than a gliding shadow. Browning readily might have believed her a ghost, and it is quite certain that Toots, if similarly placed, would have shrieked like a maniac from sheer fright.
With the stealthy silence of a panther creeping on its prey, Nell Thornton advanced toward the open door.
Then Browning saw that her gaze was not fixed so much on the sleeping man as on him, and awoke to a realization of the fact that Nell was trying to come to his rescue, and that the knife was to sever the ropes that held him, and was not intended as a weapon with which to do murder.