Surprised to encounter travelers at so remote a spot at that hour, he edged cautiously into the underbrush and lay flat on a huge rock which overlooked the path from a low eminence at its right.
They had halted just beyond the range of hearing, but when with mountain suddenness, like a torn curtain, the half-light became full-light he froze into a petrified astonishment which seemed to have clutched and squeezed all the vitality out of his heart, and to have left his blood currentless.
The abrupt revelation of light had fallen on the bright hair of Blossom Fulkerson and the dark uncovered head of Jerry Henderson; and before the monstrous incredibility of the situation could be fully grasped, the girl, to whom he had bade farewell as his acknowledged sweetheart, had thrown her arms around the neck of the man to whose loyal care he had confided her, and that man was kissing her with a lover's ardor!
What their words might be he could not tell—but their clinging embrace said enough—and Blossom was giving her lips with eager willingness.
What their words might be he could not tell—but their clinging embrace said enough
Bear Cat lay for a moment, sick, dizzy and motionless while a groan, which never reached his lips, spasmodically shook his chest and shoulders. Succeeding that paralyzed instant, a fever of unspeakable fury surged over him and while all the rest of his body stretched unstirring, his arms slipped forward and the muzzle of his rifle crept over the ledge of rock. But that, too, was only a response to instinct and the thumb halted in the act of cocking the hammer. His vengeance called not only for satisfaction but for glutting.
Henderson must die face to face with him, not by the stealth of ambuscade, but by open violence to be administered with bare hands—realizing the cause of his punishment—dying by inches!
But as he was on the point of rising to confront them, something arrested him: the stupor of a man whose mind and heart had trusted so implicitly that they could not yet fully credit even the full demonstration of his eyes. This must, despite all its certainty, be some hallucination—some wide-eyed nightmare!
While the spell of his stunned heart held him in the thrall of inaction, Henderson and Blossom parted with slow reluctance and took up their opposite direction of journey.