A little longer he waited—till the mulatto, rising to his knees, offered his face full in the blazing light. At that moment his finger pressed the trigger, and his unerring bullet passed through the brain of his treacherous foeman!
Chapter Sixty One.
The zambo had disappeared in the underwood almost at the same instant that Carlos had mounted and galloped out through the avenue. Not a living creature remained in the glade.
The huge body lay with arms outstretched, one of them actually across the blazing pile! Its weight, pressing down the faggots, half-obscured their light. Enough there was to exhibit the ghastly face mottled with washes of crimson. There was no motion in either body or limbs—no more than in that of the counterfeit form that was near. Dead was the yellow hunter—dead! The hot flame that licked his arm, preparing to devour it, gave him no pain. Fire stirs not the dead!
Where were the others? They had gone off in directions nearly opposite! Were they flying from each other?
The zambo had gone back in the same direction whence he had come. He had gone in a very different manner though. After disappearing behind the leafy screen, he had not halted, but rushed on like one terrified beyond the power of controlling himself. The cracking of dead sticks, and the loud rustling among the bushes, told that he was pressing through the grove in headlong flight. These noises had ceased—so, too, the echo of hoofs which for a while came back from the galloping horse of the cibolero.
Where were they now—zambo and cibolero? Had they fled from each other? It would have seemed so from the relative directions in which they had gone.
It was not so in reality. Whatever desire the zambo might have felt to get away from that spot, his antagonist had no such design. The latter had galloped out of the glade, but not in flight.