Pell stepped nearer to his intended victim. "Our wife is right," he scoffed. "It isn't killing that I mind—it's being killed that I object to."
"They'll hang you!" Gilbert warned.
Pell smiled his sardonic, evil smile. "The unwritten law works in Arizona as well as in other places." He brutally ordered Lucia to get out of his way.
But Lucia still clung to Gilbert. "I won't! I won't move!" she yelled, and her voice held the desperation of womankind.
Deliberately Pell said: "All right! Then take what's coming to you and you go to hell together, damn you both!"
He raised the gun and aimed a deadly aim.
Gilbert, in that mad moment, threw Lucia aside, to save her. He could not let her die with him, much as he hated to leave her with this fiend incarnate. "You'd better shoot straight," he cried to Pell. "Because, by God, if you miss...." With one wild lunge, he knocked the lamp from the table between them, and there was instant and terrible darkness.
Confused, Pell did not know what to do. His tongue was cleaving to the roof of his mouth, his hand seemed to freeze on the trigger.
"What the devil!" he called out. And then a figure appeared miraculously in the alcove, where one candle still burned, shedding a ghostly beam of light from a shelf. "Good God!"