“Say! You, who are up to fighting a man with your bare hands, could you—eh?—could you manage to stick one with a thing like that knife of mine?”
She opened her eyes very wide and gave him a wild smile.
“How can I tell?” she whispered enchantingly. “Will you let me have a look at it?”
Without taking his eyes from her face, he pulled the knife out of its sheath—a short, broad, cruel double-edged blade with a bone handle—and only then looked down at it.
“A good friend,” he said simply. “Take it in your hand and feel the balance,” he suggested.
At the moment when she bent forward to receive it from him, there was a flash of fire in her mysterious eyes—a red gleam in the white mist which wrapped the promptings and longings of her soul. She had done it! The very sting of death was in her hands, the venom of the viper in her paradise, extracted, safe in her possession—and the viper's head all but lying under her heel. Ricardo, stretched on the mats of the floor, crept closer and closer to the chair in which she sat.
All her thoughts were busy planning how to keep possession of that weapon which had seemed to have drawn into itself every danger and menace on the death-ridden earth. She said with a low laugh, the exultation in which he failed to recognize:
“I didn't think that you would ever trust me with that thing!”
“Why not?”
“For fear I should suddenly strike you with it.”