But Baylor’s Horse, or any fraction of it, does not die without a struggle. With my hands free, I got a grip of the black-faced maniac’s wrists, held it, tightened it until I could feel the joints crack and his big fingers relax because there was no longer any living connection between them and the pounding heart and maddened brain.
After that it was simpler, though he was the heavier man. With a quick bending of the strangled wrists, I rolled him off of me, holding him so until the red lights stopped their dancing and I could get up with some assurance that I should not be entirely helpless on my feet. Then I loosed him, and staggered upright, reeled across to the door and shut and barred it.
“That’s for you, as well as for myself, you addle-headed idiot!” I panted; and then I swore at him heartily as he sat on the floor nursing his helpless hands.
He was not much behind me in the cursing, his tongue being still uncrippled. What he called me is not in any gentleman’s word-book, but I did not lay it up against him. “You have reason, my friend,” I allowed him, and sat down on the bed’s edge to rest my throat while he eased the burden of his soul.
“Well, have you said it all?” I asked, after he had sworn himself out of breath and doubled up every epithet in the vocabulary of abuse.
“Damn you for a—” he began again, taking a fresh start; and I laughed till my strained eyes ran over with the tears and my throat ached again. The figure of the man, with his darkly ferocious face, sitting hunched upon the floor, his benumbed hands crossed upon his knees and his loose-hung jaw wagging like a panting dog’s in a vain effort to keep pace with the outpouring flood of vituperation, was inexpressibly mirth-provoking to me, though another might not have found it so.
But there finally came an end, alike to his ravings and to my laughter, and we arrived at some better understanding; though not all at once, you may be sure.
“Curse you for a deserting traitor, Captain Richard Page! I’ll kill you for this night’s work, if it’s the last thing I ever live to do!” was his closing volley.
“Just as much of a ‘deserting traitor’ as you are, Sergeant Champe; no more and no less,” I retorted, curbing a mighty desire to laugh at him again.
“What’s that?” he growled suspiciously. “I tell you I am a deserter; Middleton saw me come off.”