“Maybe not. I can't always come when I'm expected, nor where I'm wanted,” said Colonel Ashley coolly. “Now, my friend—Jack!” he cried sharply.
“I've got him, Colonel,” was the cool answer, and there was a cry of agony from the chauffeur as his wrist was turned, almost to the breaking point, while there dropped from his paralyzed hand a magazine pistol, thudding to the sand at his feet.
“Go on, Colonel,” said Jack, who had slipped off to one side, out of the focus of the glaring light, just in time to prevent Jean Forette from using the weapon he had quickly taken from a side pocket. “Go on, close in. I've drawn his stinger.”
“Messieurs, what does this mean?” demanded the girl beside Jean. “Who are you? What do you want? Ah, it is you—and you!” and she turned first to Colonel Ashley and then to Jack Young. “You who have talked so kindly to me—who have asked me so much about—about my husband! It is you who come like thieves and assassins! Speak to them, Jean! Tell them to go!”
The Frenchman was breathing heavily, for Jack had a merciless grip on him.
“Speak to them, Jean!” implored the girl, while her mother, standing in the door with her knitting, looked wonderingly on. “Why do they come to take you like a traitor?”
“It—it's all a mistake!” panted the chauffeur.
“You've got me wrong, messieurs. I—I didn't do it. It was all an accident. He—I—Oh, my God! You!” and he started back as Morocco Kate stepped toward him, pulling from her face the veil that had covered it when the glaring light showed. Jack Young now held the electric torch.
“You!” he murmured hoarsely.
“Yes, I!” she cried. “The woman you kicked out like a sick dog! I've found you at last, and now I'll make you suffer all I did and more—you—devil!”