He stared in front of him. Something on the floor near the door glittered and reflected the light from the single, dim incandescent. He lurched up from the chair, and going toward the object, snatched it up. It was Crang's revolver—but Larmon was upon him in an instant.
“Not that way, either!” said Larmon hoarsely.
John Bruce brushed his hand across his eyes.
“No, not that way, either,” he repeated like a child.
He went back to the chair and sat down. He was aware that Larmon was kneeling beside the mattress, but he paid no attention to the other.
“The man's unconscious,” Larmon said.
John Bruce did not turn his head.
The minutes passed.
John Bruce's brain began to clear; but the unbalanced fury that had possessed him was giving place now only to one more implacable in its considered phase. He looked around him. Crang, evidently recovered, was sitting up on the mattress. The letters Larmon had taken from Crang's pocket lay on the table. John Bruce picked them up idly. From one of them a steamer ticket fell out. He stared at this for a moment. A passage for John Bruce to South America! Then low, an ugly sound, his laugh echoed around the place.
South America! It recalled him to his actual surroundings—that on the other side of the door were Crang's apaches. There was still time to catch the steamer, wasn't there—for South America? “If the bluff worked”—he remembered his thoughts, the plan that had actuated him when he had crouched there at the door, waiting for Crang to enter. Strange! It wouldn't be a bluff any more! All that was gone. What he would do now, and carry it through to its end, was what he had intended to bluff Crang into believing he would do. And Crang, too, would understand now how little of bluff there was—or, misunderstanding, pay for it with his life.