“And now you are the fool,” she added.
“No, you are wrong; I am only enjoying myself before the show is over. I wanted to see you, and your young devotee, twist and turn before the fact of death. I have killed, and seen 160 executed, a number of people, men and women; but I was still curious—a great dancer and a rich young American. That is an unusual day.”
It was best, Charles Abbott decided, to bring about as much as possible with no more delay; the prime necessary act accomplished, they could face the problems of the immediate future steadily. He quietly produced his pistol and levelled it. The dry click which alone followed the pulling of the trigger made the officer aware of the attempt upon his life. A dark angry surge invaded his face, and then receded. “No man will ever kill me,” he repeated. “It is my star.” A hand left the cane and produced a small gold whistle.
Charles stared dully at the useless weapon, with its mounting of mother-of-pearl, which he still held.
“The cartridges have been too long in their barrels,” Santacilla explained; “they have dried and shifted. You should have greased them every week.”
La Clavel stood, lost in thought, like a woman in a dream. Her hair, over which she had spent such time and curses, was an elaborate silhouette against the light. “Ceaza, Ceaza,” she implored, going to him, “you must let me go 161 and dance in Buenos Aires, they have never seen me there, it is necessary to my career.” She was close beside him, when he rose suddenly, pushing the chair between them.
“You Andalusian devil!” he cried, and put the whistle to his lips. Before he could blow, the dancer had flung herself on him, with an arm bound about his neck, a hand dragging at his throat. The whistle fell, the chair was brushed aside, and the man and woman, in a straining desperate grip, swayed into the middle of the floor.
Charles, driven by an inherited instinct to protect La Clavel, to replace her in such a struggle, caught at either of the locked shoulders; but, whirling in the passion of their strife, they struck him aside. He made another effort to pull Santacilla to the floor, without success; and then, with a small stout chair in his hands, he waited for an opportunity to bring it crashing on the officer’s head. He was appalled by the fury of the woman silently trying to choke her enemy; her other hand, grasping the thin glimmer of the knife always convenient in her stocking, the officer held away from them. Her years of dancing, her early hardening life in the mountains, had given her a strength and litheness now tearing 162 at the weight, the masculinity, of Santacilla. He was trying, in vain, to break her wrist, to close his fingers into her throat; and, bending, the fragility of her clothes ripped across her sinuous back. Shifting and evading the thrust of his power, she was sending the blood in purple waves over his neck and thick cheeks. Neither of them cried out, spoke; there was only the sound of hoarse breathing, inarticulate expressions of unendurable strain. Charles Abbott, raising, holding poised, the chair, and lowering it, was choked with the grappling horror before him.
La Clavel’s face was as blanched as the officer’s was dark, her eyes were wide-open and set, as though she were in a galvanic trance. Again and again Santacilla tried to tear away her arms, to release himself from the constriction at his neck. His fingers dug red furrows through her flesh, they tormented and outraged her. A palm closed upon her countenance, and blood ran from under it. But there was no weakening of her force, no slackening in her superb body. She seemed curiously impersonal; robbed of all traits of women; she was like a symbolical fate, the figure from a shield, from an emblem, dragging him to death.
Then, suddenly, in an inadequate muffled 163 voice burdened with a shuddering echo of fear, he cried for her to release him. It was so unexpected, he became so inexplicably limp, that La Clavel backed away instinctively. Charles started forward, the chair lifted high; but he was stopped by the expression, the color, of Ceazy Santacilla’s face. The officer turned, with his hands at his throat, toward the window. He took an uncertain step, and then stood wavering, strangely helpless, pathetically stricken.