King’s lips moved, though there was no sound of words. A look of ruined radiance shone in his face. Stella settled in a little heap. Her head sank on to her arms, and she uttered a soft, desperate cry.
The tragic tableau held the men about her in a state of breathlessness.
“Mrs. King,” murmured Captain Utterbourne; and there was an unmistakable element of thanksgiving in his voice.
He would have questioned her. But after all, there could not be much to say. The little spirit lamp beside the cot, and the pipe and dipper and the covered box seemed telling the story over and over each time a glance fell upon them.
Tsuda, shrunken and aged, moved almost imperceptibly round to the door. He waited until the wife of the Kami crumpled into a heap, and then, with the spell of motionless tenseness broken, he saw his way clear to slipping out into the night.
However, the gods, for whom he had always evinced so lofty an affection, were not very kind to Tsuda. It was like a run of ill luck in faro. Scarcely had he left the house, when a furious beast sprang upon his shoulders and crushed him to the ground under a storm of blows. The furious beast had once been a quiet little clerk in Market street. But much water had run under the bridge, and besides—the clerk had lost his head completely.
He was magnificent and elemental. He was mad to taste blood, and he pounded with the merciless hammer of fists which possessed little science but their full quota of untrained punishing power. One blow thrilled him profoundly. Tsuda lurched back with a groan and thrust an arm across his eyes. Then he, too, fought—furious and desperate, like a wounded jaguar, using his teeth and nails freely, and butting with his bullet-like Mongolian head. Tsuda had naturally known something of defense in his younger days, for he had considered it a good thing for a man to know how to take care of himself, even if he did expect to be a priest. They clinched and Tsuda neatly tripped his foe and they went down together in a crashing sprawl.
But somehow, by sheer force of youth and recklessness, probably, Jerome managed to capture both of Tsuda’s wrists. The man’s muscles strained and quivered, while his lusty opponent, with swift red passion in his eye now, bent to the grip, his teeth grinding. The belligerent contact intoxicated him. It was like his first champagne. It was the finishing stroke of victorious manhood.
In this position he could have broken Tsuda’s arms, and Tsuda knew it and cried out warningly. Never since the ancient day in Nemuro, when he got into a row with miners over a little dancing girl, had Tsuda been so tempestuously set upon. This time the row was not over a geisha, but the only white woman on Hagen’s Island.
Jerome felt Captain Utterbourne standing calmly yet a little grimly above them.