He did not answer. His eyes were burning with a wanton fire, they glowed with the fierce, fell purpose of animal desire; he breathed shrilly, rapidly, gaspingly, though the strength that he had been compelled to use to overmatch hers had not been great.
She did not succeed in retarding the advance of the table, but she did succeed in directing its course a little, so that instead of backing her against the wall, as he no doubt intended to do, she brought up finally against the stove in the corner.
There was a fire in the stove—she had kept it going to keep Calumet's supper warm—and when she felt her body against it she reached around and secured a flat iron. The handle burned her hand, but she lifted it and hurled it with all her force at his head. He dodged, laughing derisively. She seized another and threw it, and this he dodged also. She was reaching for the teakettle when he shoved the table aside and lunged at her, and she dropped the kettle with a scream of horror and slipped around the stove to the wall near the sitting-room door, reaching the latter and trying frantically to unbar it.
She heard Bob's voice on the other side of the door; he was calling, "Betty! Betty!" in shrill, scared accents, and when Taggart leaped at her, seizing her by the shoulders as she worked with the fastenings of the door, she screamed to Bob to get the rifle from Malcolm's room, directing him to go out the front way, go around to the kitchen and shoot Taggart through one of the windows.
How long she struggled with Taggart there by the door she did not know. It might have been an hour or merely a minute. But she fought him, clawing at his face with her hands, biting him, kicking him. And she remembered that he was getting the better of her, that his breath was in her face and that he was dragging her toward the lamp on the shelf, evidently intending to extinguish it—that he had almost reached it, was, indeed, reaching a hand out to grasp it, when there came a flash from the window, the crash of breaking glass, and the roar of an exploding firearm.
She also remembered thinking that Bob had taken a desperate chance in shooting at Taggart when she was so close to him, and she had a vivid recollection of Taggart releasing her and staggering back without uttering a sound. She caught a glimpse of his face as he sank to the floor; there was a gaping hole in his forehead and his eyes were set and staring with an expression of awful horror and astonishment. Then the kitchen darkened, she felt the floor rising to meet her, and she knew no more.
CHAPTER XXIII
FOR THE ALTARS OF HIS TRIBE
The first sound that Betty heard when consciousness began to return to her was a loud pounding at the kitchen door.