Carrington stood motionless a little longer—until the black horse, its rider sitting straight in the saddle, in cowboy fashion, reached the edge of the wood surrounding the house. Then Carrington, cursing, his lips in a hideous pout, drew a pistol from a hip-pocket. And when the black horse was within fifty feet of him, and still coming at a speed which there was no gauging, Carrington leveled the pistol.
Once—twice—three, four, five, six times he pulled the trigger of the weapon. Carrington saw a grim, mocking smile on the rider’s face, and knew none of his bullets had taken effect.
Unarmed now, he was suddenly stricken with a panic of fear; and while the rider of the black horse was dismounting at the edge of the porch, Carrington dove for the front door of the house and vanished inside, slamming the door behind him, directly in the rider’s face.
When Taylor threw the door open he saw Carrington, far back in the room, swinging a chair over his head. At Taylor’s appearance he threw the chair with all the force his frenzy of fear could put into the effort. Taylor ducked, and the chair flew past him, sailing uninterruptedly outside and over the porch railing.
Carrington ran through the big front room, through the next room—the sitting-room—knocking chairs over in his flight, throwing a big center table at his silent, implacable pursuer. He slammed the sitting-room door and tried to lock it, but he could not turn the key quickly enough, and Taylor burst the door open, almost plunging against Carrington as he came through it.
Carrington ran into the dining-room, shoved the dining-room table in Taylor’s way as Taylor tried to reach him; but Taylor leaped over the obstruction, and when Carrington dodged into Marion Harlan’s room, Taylor was so close that he might have grasped the big man.
Taylor had said no word. The big man saw two guns swinging at Taylor’s hips, and he wondered vaguely why the man did not use them. It occurred to Carrington as he plunged through Marion Harlan’s room into Martha’s, and from there to the kitchen, and back again to the dining-room, that Taylor was not going to shoot him, and his panic partially left him.
And yet there was a gleam in Taylor’s eyes that made his soul cringe in terror—the cold, bitter fury of a peaceloving man thoroughly aroused.
Twice, as Taylor pursued Carrington through the sitting-room again and into another big room that adjoined it, Carrington’s courage revived long enough to permit him to consider making a stand against Taylor, but each time as he stiffened with the determination, the terrible rage in Taylor’s eyes dissuaded him, and he continued to evade the clash.
But he knew that the clash must come, and when, in their rapid, headlong movements, Carrington came close to the front door and tried to slip out of it, Taylor lunged against him and struck at him, the fist just grazing Carrington’s jaw, the big man understood that Taylor was intent on beating him with his fists.