Chapter 22
WHAT DID IT MEAN?
"The help is coming, Bill," said Milton Rhodes. "And that reminds me: I haven't reloaded my revolver."
"I would lose no time in doing so," I told him.
He got out the weapon and proceeded to reload it. It was not, by the way, one of these new-fangled things but one of your old-fashioned revolvers—solid, substantial, one that would stand hard usage, a piece to be depended upon. And that it seemed was just what we needed—weapons to be depended upon.
The angel was watching Rhodes closely. I wondered if she knew what had killed her demon; knew, I mean, that this metal thing, with its glitter so dull and so cold, was a weapon. It was extremely unlikely that she had, in that horrible moment on the bridge, seen what actually had happened. However that might have been, it was soon plain that she recognized the revolver as a weapon, or, at any rate, guessed that it was.
With an interjection, she stepped to Rhodes' side, and, with swift pantomime, she assured us that there was nothing at all to apprehend from those advancing figures.
"After all," Milton said, slipping the revolver into his pocket, "why should we be so infernally suspicious? Maybe this world is very different from our own."
"That's just what I'm afraid of. And it seems to me," I added, my right hand in that pocket which contained my revolver, "that we have good cause to be suspicious. Have you forgotten what grandfather Scranton saw up there at the Tamahnowis Rocks (and what he didn't see) and the death there, so short a time since, of Rhoda Dillingham, to say nothing of what happened to us here a few minutes ago? That we are not at the bottom of that chasm—well, I am not anxious to have another shave like that."