For a time, he stood looking outward. From somewhere at his back, in the vaultlike recesses of the building, drifted the heavy pungency of incense burning at a shrine.
His ears were alert for the sounds that might, in their drifting inconsequence, mean everything. Then, as no reminder came, he closed his eyes, and wracked his imagination in concentrated thought as a monitor to memory. He groped after some detail of the other time, if the other time had been an actual fragment of his life. He strove to recall the features of the officer who commanded the death squad, some face that had stood there before him on that morning; the style of uniforms they wore. He kept his eyes closed, not only for seconds, but for minutes, and, when in answer to his focused self-hypnotism and prodding suggestion no answer came, there came in its stead a torrent of joyous relief.
Then, he heard something like a subdued ejaculation, and opened his eyes upon a startling spectacle.
Leaning out from the shadow of an abutment stood a thin man, whose face in the moon showed a strange mingling of savagery and terror. It was a face Saxon did not remember to have seen before. The eyes glittered, and the teeth showed as the thin lips were drawn back over them in a snarling sort of smile. But the most startling phase of the tableau, to the man who opened his eyes upon it without warning, was the circumstance of the unknown’s pressing an automatic pistol against his breast. Saxon’s first impression was that he had fallen prey to a robber, but he knew instinctively that this expression was not that of a man bent on mere thievery. It had more depth and evil satisfaction. It was the look of a man who turns a trick in an important game.
As the painter gazed at the face and figure bending forward from the abutment’s sooty shadow like some chimera or gargoyle fashioned in the wall, his first sentiment was less one of immediate peril than of argument with himself. Surely, so startling a dénouement should serve to revive his memory, if he had faced other muzzles there!
When the man with the pistol spoke, it was in words that were illuminating. The voice was tremulous with emotion, probably nervous terror, yet the tone was intended to convey irony, and was partly successful.
“I presume,” it said icily, “you wished to enjoy the sensation of standing at that point—this time with the certainty of walking away alive. It must be a pleasant reminiscence, but one never can tell.” The thin man paused, and then began afresh, his voice charged with a bravado that somehow seemed to lack genuineness.
“Last time, you expected to be carried away dead—and went away living. This time, you expected to walk away in safety, and, instead, you’ve got to die. Your execution was only delayed.” He gave a short, nervous laugh, then his voice came near breaking as he went on almost wildly: “I’ve got to kill you, Carter. God knows I don’t want to do it, but I must have security! This knowledge that you are watching me to drop on me like a hawk on a rat, will drive me mad. They’ve told me up and down both these God-forsaken coasts, from Ancon to Buenos Ayres, from La Boca to Concepcion, that you would get me, and now it’s sheer self-defense with me. I know you never forgave a wrong—and God knows that I never did you the wrong you are trying to revenge. God knows I am innocent.”
Rodman halted breathless, and stood with his flat chest rising and falling almost hysterically. He was in the state when men are most irresponsible and dangerous.
Meanwhile, a pistol held in an unsteady hand, its trigger under an uncertain finger, emphasized a situation that called for electrical thinking. To assert a mistake in identity would be ludicrous. Saxon was not in a position to claim that. The other man seemed to have knowledge that he himself lacked. Moreover, that knowledge was the information which Saxon, as self-prosecutor, must have. The only course was to meet the other’s bravado with a counter show of bravado, and keep him talking. Perhaps, some one would pass in the empty street.