The accused began again to speak, but the captain cut short his words, fearful of their effect on the hearers.
"Gag the prisoner!" he commanded, and despite Milt's protests, the order was speedily carried out, and soon the prisoner was lying bound and gagged, close to the dark opening piercing the very earth. "To your horses!" the leader cried savagely, "and to hell with all traitors."
For a moment the members of the little band appeared to hesitate, moved by conflicting impulses, but the instinct of self-preservation is strongly implanted in the human breast, and will crowd out many noble qualities. The vacillation was but momentary; slowly and silently the men began to move away, each one eyeing his neighbor askance, as if to discover who held the fatal red bean within his keeping.
Thus they melted into the night, stealing like dissolving shadows down to the thicket below where the horses were hitched.
Soon after the tread of many horses' feet broke into the hush of the lonely scene. Some seemed going in one direction, some in another, and on the sleeping hills a darkness lay heavily—a darkness such as hides many a ghastly crime.
CHAPTER XXIII.
The cheering light of hope began to break upon the crouching figure on the ragged edge of rock above the quarry, as she watched the men disappear, one by one, into the darkness on their way to their horses.
It suddenly dawned upon her that the hapless prisoner was to be left, bound and gagged, in this lonely spot until the return of that member of the band who had drawn the red bean. Some subtle intuition warned the alert onlooker that this one was either the Captain or Steve. Possibly both might return on the murderous mission, and, but for her, only the few faint pitying stars of heaven would be witnesses of a dastardly crime, darker than the night itself.