CHAPTER IX
Cal Maggard lay unmoving as the old man's chair creaked. Over there with his back turned toward the fire stood Bas Rowlett, his barrel-like chest swelling heavily with that excitement which he sought to conceal. To Caleb Harper, serenely unsuspicious, the churlish sullenness of the eyes that resented his intrusion, went unmarked. It was an intervention that had come between the wounded man and immediate death, and now Rowlett cursed himself for a temporizing fool who had lost his chance.
He stood with feet wide apart and his magnified shadow falling gigantically across floor and wall—across the bed, too, on which his intended victim lay defenseless.
If Cal Maggard had been kneeling with his neck on the guillotine block the intense burden of his suspense could hardly have been greater.
So long as Caleb Harper sat there, with his benign old face open-eyed in wakefulness, death would stand grudgingly aloof, staring at the wounded man yet held in leash.
If those eyes closed in sleep the restive executioner would hardly permit himself to be the third time thwarted.
Yet the present reprieve would for a few moments endure, since the assassin would hesitate to goad his victim to any appeal for help.
Slowly the fire began to dwindle and the shadows to encroach with a dominion of somberness over the room. It seemed to the figure in the bed as he struggled against rising tides of torpor and exhaustion that his own resolution was waning with the firelight and that the murk of death approached with the thickening shadows.
He craved only sleep yet knew that it meant death.
With a morose passion closely akin to mania the thoughts of the other man, standing with hands clenched at his back, were running in turbulent freshet.