In a frenzy of terror she lashed her laboring horse's flanks as the animal dug and clawed like a cat at the loose rock footing of the steep ascent. White to the lips she searched the foreground for a ravine or a coulee that would afford a means of escape. But before her loomed only the ever steepening wall, its surface half concealed by the scattering scrub. Once more she looked backward. The breath was whistling through the blood-red flaring nostrils of Bethune's horse, and her glance flew to the face of the man. Never in her wildest nightmares had she imagined the soul-curdling horror of that face. The lips writhed back in a hideous grin of hate. A long blue-red welt bisected the features obliquely—a welt from which red blood flowed freely at the corner of a swollen eye. White foam gathered upon the distorted lips and drooled down onto the chin where it mingled with the blood in a pink meringue that dripped in fluffy chunks upon his shirt front. The uninjured eye was a narrow gleam of venom, and the breath swished through the man's nostrils as from the strain of great physical labor.
"Oh, for my gun!" thought the girl. "I'd—I'd kill him!" With a wild scramble her horse went down. "Vil! Vil!" she shrieked, in a frenzy of despair, and freeing herself from the floundering animal, she struggled to her feet and faced her pursuer with a sharp rock fragment upraised in her two hands.
Monk Bethune laughed—as the fiends must laugh in hell. A laugh that struck a chill to the very heart of the girl. Her muscles went limp at the sound of it and she felt the strength ebbing from her body like sand from an upturned glass. The rock fragment became an insupportable weight. It crashed to the ground, and rolled clattering to Bethune's feet. He, too, had dismounted, and stood beside his horse, his fists slowly clenching and unclenching in gloating anticipation. Patty turned to run, but her limbs felt numb and heavy, and she pitched forward upon her knees. With a slow movement of his hand, Bethune wiped the pink foam from his chin, examined it, snapped it from his fingers, cleansed them upon the sleeve of his shirt—and again, deliberately, he laughed, and started to climb slowly forward.
A rock slipped close beside the girl, and the next instant a voice sounded in her ear: "I don't reckon he's 'round yere, Miss. I hain't saw Vil this mo'nin'." Rifle in hand, Watts stepped from behind a scrub pine, and as his eyes fell upon Bethune, he stood fumbling his beard with uncertain fingers.
"He—he'll kill me!" gasped the girl.
"Sho', now, Miss—he won't hurt yo' none, will yo', Mr. Bethune? Gineral Jackson! Mr. Bethune, look at yo' face! Yo' must of rode again' a limb!"
"Shut up, and get out of here!" screamed the quarter-breed. "And, if you know what's good for you, you'll forget that you've seen anyone this morning."
"B'en layin' up yere in the gap fer to git me a deer. I heerd yo'-all comin', like, so's I waited."
"Get out, I tell you, before I kill you!" cried Bethune, beside himself with rage. "Go!" The man's hand plunged beneath his shirt and came out with a glitter of steel.
The mountaineer eyed the blade indifferently, and turned to the girl. "Ef yo' goin' my ways, ma'am, jest yo' lead yo' hoss on ahaid. They's a game trail runs slaunchways up th'ough the gap yender. I'll kind o' foller 'long behind."