And at the edge of the cliff where the moonlight and the starlight made a vivid arena of the table of rock its message seemed to beat with the clearness of a silvery drum. Then it stopped. Its echoes melted away, and the two men who had heard it there remained unchanged.
Carter seemed straighter and harder, his face more like carven stone. But he was ready. And Aleck Curry was like a huge gorilla gathering himself for a leap.
"Carter—if you mean that—I'll kill you!" he said in a voice that was thick with passion.
"I mean it," replied Carter, biting his words short. "I've taken the trouble to tell you the whole story. But you can't understand and you never will. You're a snake. You're a traitor to both justice and the law. You think your power over Peter will give you vengeance and something from Mona. But it won't. And I warn you again that if you try to use your knowledge, if you offer Peter as a price to Mona, if you give him up to the law when she strikes you in the face—as she will!—then I shall go to the highest authorities and strip you to the skin. The truth will blast you. I will tell how you offered me bribes, and then threatened; I will tell of your affair in the home of Jacques Gautier and expose the horrible trail you have left wherever your slimy soul has gone. I shall investigate the death of the young Indian girl on the Arrowhead. I——"
He did not finish. Curry, the man who had waited, the fiend who had kept the fires of hatred and passion burning until they were madness, saw more than the threatened ruin for himself. Reputation, family, his place in the service meant nothing to him. What he saw now in the white and almost deathlike face and gleaming eyes of the Ferret was the end of the dream he had built up—the end not only of his power over Peter but of his last chance to possess Mona. If Carter carried out his threat, if he told the story of Gautier's wife and laid naked the truth of the Indian girl's death on the Arrowhead—then all that he might say against Peter would be discounted in the eyes of the law, and punishment would fall upon himself.
But he was not thinking of this punishment. At times the evil mind in his heavy head worked with amazing swiftness—and in this last moment of Carter's threat and defiance he saw the yawning abyss of the cliff behind the Ferret, and its overwhelming temptation. With Carter down there, dead, and Peter walking straight into the trap at Five Fingers, his own power and triumph would be more complete than he had ever dreamed it could be—for he would make Peter also the Ferret's murderer!
The moon revealed the monstrous thought that leaped like flame into his face, and it was then Carter cut his words short to meet the avalanche of flesh and fury that descended upon him.
Swift as a flash he sensed Curry's intention of throwing him over the cliff, and twined his arms about his enemy's neck as they crashed upon the rock. For a moment after that a great shadow of fear darkened the Ferret's soul. A hundred times in their associations on the trail he had witnessed the tests and measured the possibilities of Aleck's huge body and herculean strength. And now he was at death grips with it. That day he had seen a wood-mouse in the fangs of a weasel, and he was the wood-mouse now. And then he thought of Peter—of Peter and Mona and the battle at the pool two years ago when they had beaten this great hulk of a man. Fear went out of him. His biggest thrill in life was in the main chance against death. And this was the biggest of all!