She heard the clinch in the struggle and the dull blow of the knife. In a sudden flash she saw it all. He had succeeded in rousing Nance's avarice and transforming her into a fiend. Without knowing it she was stabbing her own son to death in the room in which he had been born!
She tried to scream and her lips refused to move. She tried to hurry to the rescue and her knees turned to water.
Gasping for breath, she drew the bar from her prison door and walked slowly into the room.
Nance's tall, bony figure was still crouched over the open bag, her left hand buried in the gold, her right gripping the knife, her face convulsed with greed—avarice and murder blended into perfect hell-lit unity at last.
Jim lay on his back, limp and still, obliquely across the couch, his breast bared in the struggle, the blood oozing a widening scarlet blot on his white shirt. His head had fallen backward over the edge and could not be seen.
Without moving a muscle, her body crouching, Nance spoke:
“You wuz awake—you heered?”
“Yes!”
The gleaming eyes burned through the gray dawn, two points of scintillating, hellish light fixed in purpose on the intruder.
She had only meant to take the money. The fool had fought. She killed him because she had to. And now the sobbing, sniveling little idiot who had kept her waiting all night had stuck her nose into some thing that didn't concern her. If she opened her mouth, the gallows would be the end.