Clancy sees his advantage, and raises his gun, quick as for the shooting of a snipe. The crack comes; and, simultaneous with it, Richard Darke is seen to drop out of his saddle, and fall face foremost on the plain—his horse, with a wild neigh, bolting away from him.
The fallen man makes no attempt to rise, nor movement of any kind, save a convulsive tremor through his frame; the last throe of parting life, which precedes the settled stillness of death. For surely is he dead.
Clancy, dismounting, advances towards the spot; hastily, to hinder the dog from tearing him, which the enraged animal seems determined to do. Chiding it off, he bends over the prostrate body, which he perceives has ceased to breathe. A sort of curiosity, some impulse irresistible, prompts him to look for the place where his bullet struck. In the heart, as he can see by the red stream still flowing forth!
“Just where he hit me! After all, not strange—no coincidence; I aimed at him there.”
For a time he stands gazing down at the dead man’s face. Silently, without taunt or recrimination. On his own there is no sign of savage triumph, no fiendish exultation. Far from his thoughts to insult, or outrage the dead. Justice has had requital, and vengeance been appeased. It is neither his rival in love, nor his mortal enemy, who now lies at his feet; but a breathless body, a lump of senseless clay, all the passions late inspiring it, good and bad, gone to be balanced elsewhere.
As he stands regarding Darke’s features, in their death pallor showing livid by the moon’s mystic light, a cast of sadness comes over his own, and he says in subdued soliloquy:—
“Painful to think I have taken a man’s life—even his! I wish it could have been otherwise. It could not—I was compelled to it. And surely God will forgive me, for ridding the world of such a wretch?”
Then raising himself to an erect attitude, with eyes upturned to heaven—as when in the cemetery over his mother’s grave, he made that solemn vow—remembering it, he now adds in like solemnal tone—
“I’ve kept my oath. Mother; thou art avenged!”