A cold shudder passed through Edmonstone's strong frame. The wings of death beat in his ears and fanned his cheek with icy breath. The dread angel was hovering hard by. Dick felt his presence, and turned cold and sick to the heart.
"Let me see it," cried Dick, urging on the pony.
Pinckney ran down to meet him with a pale, scared face.
"It was his," faltered Pinckney. "I ought to know it. He threatened me with it when I tried to stop him bolting."
The slightest examination was enough to bespeak the worst.
"One cartridge has been fired," said Dick, in a hushed voice. "God knows what we shall find next!"
What they found next was a patch of clotting blood upon the stones of the parapet.
They exchanged no more words, but Dick got down and ran on ahead, and Pinckney took the reins.
Dick's searching eyes descried nothing to check the speed of his running till he had threaded the narrow, winding lane that led to Melmerbridge Bank, and had come out at the top of that broad highway; and there, at the roadside, stretched face downward on the damp ground, lay the motionless form of Sundown, the Australian outlaw.
The fine rain was falling all the time. The tweed clothes of the prostrate man were soaked and dark with it. Here and there they bore a still darker, soaking stain; and a thin, thin stripe of dusky red, already two feet in length, was flowing slowly down the bank, as though in time to summon the people of Melmerbridge to the spot. Under the saturated clothes there was no movement that Dick could see; but neither was there, as yet, the rigidity of death in the long, muscular, outstretched limbs.