Higher, higher, bit by bit it crept toward the horizontal. Unaccustomed to shoot from the hip, Allan realized that right before him lay a supreme test of nerve and marksmanship and skill.
To shoot and kill his boy--the thought was too hideous even to be considered. His father-heart yearned toward the frightened, crying child there in the traitor's grip.
The unconscious form of Beatrice fever-burned and panting on the bed, seemed calling aloud to him: “Aim true, Allan! Aim true!”
For one false shot inevitably sealed the child's death. To wound H'yemba and not kill him meant the catastrophe. If the bullet failed to enter brain or heart, H'yemba--though mortally hurt--would of a surety, with his last quiver of strength, sling the boy outward over the dizzying parapet.
Allan prayed; yet his prayer was wordless, formless and unconscious.
He dared not glance down at the automatic. His eyes must hold the smith's. And he must speak, must parley, at all hazards must still gain another moment's respite.
What Allan said in those last terrible, eternal seconds he could never afterward recall.
He only knew he was treating with the enemy, making terms, listening, answering--all with mechanical sub-consciousness.
His real personality, his true ego, was absolutely absorbed in the one vital, all-deciding problem of that stiffening pistol-hand.
Suddenly something seemed to cry in his ear: