“Aw, go to hell!” Tully spat. He stooped and began pawing over the ruck on the floor. Here he picked up a cap, there a piece of torn sleeve. He even found a button, and pocketed that. His search was thorough. When it ended, nothing incriminating was left.
“I reckon they won’t git much on us now,” he grinned, and contemplatively worked back and forth a loosened tooth that hardly hung to the gum. “An’ if they try to lay it on us, they can’t prove nothin’. All of us swearin’ together can git by. There ain’t no witness except him,” with a jerk of the thumb at the gasping, unconscious form. “Nobody, unless he gits well, which he ain’t noways likely to.”
He rolled Hal over, looked down with malice and hate at the pale, battered face, listened a moment to the laboring, slow râle of the breath, and nodded with satisfaction. Even the bloody froth on Hal’s blue lips gave him joy.
“You got what’s comin’ to you, all right!” he sneered. “Got it proper. Thought you’d git funny with Mac an’ his gang, huh? Always butted through everythin’, did you? Well, this here was one proposition you couldn’t butt through. We was one too many fer you, all righto!”
He turned, and saw Coombs with the kris in hand. Fear leaped into his face, but Coombs only gibed:
“You’re a great one, ain’t you? Coverin’ up the story o’ what happened here an’ leavin’ that in a corner!”
Fear gave way to sudden covetousness.
“Gimme that there knife!” demanded Tully. “There is a souvenir! That there’s a krish. I can hide it O. K. Gimme it!”
Coombs’s answer was to stoop, lay the kris down and set his huge sea-boot on it. A quick, upward wrench at the lotus-bud handle and the snaky, poisoned blade, maybe a thousand years old, snapped with a jangle of dissevered steel.
“Here, you!” shouted Tully. But already Coombs had swung to the companion. One toss, and lotus-bud and shattered blade gyrated into the dark. The waves, white-foaming, received them; they vanished forever from the world of men.