“Look at his blood!” said she, hoarsely whispering. “Look at it–look at it!”
“Isom! Isom!” called Joe softly, a long pause between his words, as if summoning a sleeper. He stooped over, touching Isom’s shoulder.
There was a trickle of blood on Isom’s beard, where the rifle ball had struck him in the throat; back of his head that vital stream was wasting, enlarging the pool in the hollowed plank near Ollie’s foot.
“He’s dead!” she whispered.
Again, in a flash, that quick feeling of lightness, almost joyful liberty, lifted her. Isom was dead, dead! What she had prayed for had fallen. Cruel, hard-palmed Isom, who had gripped her tender throat, was dead there on the floor at her feet! Dead by his own act, in the anger of his loveless heart.
“I’m afraid he is,” said Joe, dazed and aghast.
The night wind came in through the open door and vexed the lamp with harassing breath. Its flame darted like a serpent’s tongue, and Joe, fearful that it might go out and leave them in the dark with that bleeding corpse, crossed over softly and closed the door.
Ollie stood there, her hands clenched at her sides, no stirring of pity in her heart for her husband with the stain of blood upon his harsh, gray beard. In that moment she was supremely selfish. The possibility of accusation or suspicion in connection with his death did not occur to her. She was too shallow to look ahead to that unpleasant contingency. The bright lure of liberty was in her eyes; it was dancing in her brain. As she looked at Joe’s back the moment he stood with hand on the door, her one thought was:
“Will he tell?”
Joe came back and stood beside the lifeless form of Isom, looking down at him for a moment, pity and sorrow in his 116 face. Then he tiptoed far around the body and took up his hat from the floor where it had fallen in Isom’s scramble for the sack of gold.