“And you are a blind dunce, Jack.”
“Don’t talk axioms at me,” said Driscoll, with a warning light in his eye. “I don’t need ’em.”
“Well, now,” drawled Mr. Boone, “I can’t help it if I associate with you any longer, so I’ll just mosey round to the flower market. As they leave to-morrow, they’ll be wanting some violets.”
And he went, and Din Driscoll sat down again and hated him.
Daniel wended his way slowly, an attenuated ranger in gray mid carriages and blanketed forms. “Sho’”, he mused, “that girl’s heart is fair bleeding for him, can’t I see! Her eye-lashes, they’re wet, every now and then. And whatever the matter with her is, it’s nothing. But nothing is the very 511 darndest thing to overcome in a girl. There’s got to be strong measures. It’s got to be jolted out of her. Archimagnífico, there’s the point!”
Mr. Boone drew out a black cigar, and mangled it between his teeth. He pondered and pondered, absent-mindedly kicking at natives he bumped into. “Kidnap ’em!” he cried at length. “N-o,” he reflected, “they go in the public stage, and what with the escort, somebody’d get hurt. We don’t want any dead men at this wedding. Old Brothers and Sisters would balk anyhow, and our ecclesiastical officiator is the boy we do need. Now what the everlasting––”
He meant what salutary jolt he could invent, barring holdups, but in the same breath he meant also a most startling scene which revealed itself as he turned the corner.
A deafening crash of musketry was the first thing, and he looked up. He had come into a small plaza before a church, and against the church’s blank wall a scene was taking place before an awe-stricken throng. He understood. Another proscribed “traitor” had just been caught; and executed, naturally. But no, not executed! For as the officer of the shooting squad approached to give the stroke of mercy, the prostrate victim raised himself by one hand and knocked aside the pistol at his head. Then he laughed in the officer’s face, the most diabolical and unearthly mirth any there had ever heard. There was not a stain of blood on him. He had dropped in the breath of eternity before the bullets spattered past. But his uplifted face, with chin tilted back, was swollen, black, distorted, corded by pulsing veins, and one of the eyes–a crossed eye–bulged round and purple out of its socket, and gleamed. The demon of pain was tearing at the man’s tissue of life, but by grip of will unspeakable the agony in that grimace changed to a smile.
“Yes, poison! Vitriol!” he chattered at them hideously. “Adios, imbeciles. It’s my last–jest!”
512Whereat he fell, writhing as the acid burned to his soul. Before the astounded officer could shoot, he had grown entirely quiet.