Mackenzie gave back before him, leaping aside, firing. Checked a moment, more by the flash of the discharge in his eyes than by the bullet, it seemed, Swan roared a wilder note and pressed the charge. His immense, lunging body was dim before Mackenzie through the smoke, his uninjured hand groping like a man feeling for a door in a burning house.
Swan fell with the mad challenge on his tongue, and 305 cried his defiance still as he writhed a moment on his back, turning his face to the open door and the peace of the night at last, to die. To die in greater heroism than he had lived, and to lie there in his might and wasted magnificence of body, one hand over the threshold dabbling in the dark.
Mackenzie took the lantern from the corner where Reid had set it in his studious play for the advantage that did not come to his hand, and turned back to the closed door. Reid lay as he had fallen, Carlson’s revolver by his side. Mackenzie stepped over him and tried the door. It was unlocked, fastened only by the iron thumb-latch.
A moment Mackenzie stood, lifting the lantern to light the small room to its corners, then went in, peering and exploring into every shadow.
“Great God! She wasn’t here at all! And I’ve killed a man for that!” he said.
He turned to the open door, stifled by remorse for what he had done, although he had done it in a fight that had been pushed upon him, as all his fights in the sheeplands had been pushed. He might have taken Swan at his manly offer to fight hand-to-hand to see who should open the door; or he might have allowed him to open it, and saved all violence between them.
And this was the end of Earl Reid’s bluff to Carlson that he would deliver Joan to him there, bargained for and sold after the wild and lawless reasoning of the Norse flockmaster. And Swan had drawn his weapon with a glad light in his face, and stood up to him like a man.
“Throw it down here, Mackenzie––you can’t get by with it this time!”
Mackenzie looked up from his daze of remorseful panic, slowly, amazedly, not fully realizing that it was a human voice he heard, to see Reid where he had scrambled to his knees, Carlson’s gun in one hand, the other thrown out to support his unsteady body.