“No,” she said. “I will not open the door.”
It was stretched, of course, to the utmost limit of the chain, which permitted an aperture of two or three inches.
She still stood behind it, out of his sight, and with the revolver tightly grasped in her right hand; but now, fearing that he might decide to break the door from its fastenings, she drew back one step more, farther into the corner. Then she saw something, she did not know what, pass through the opening between the door and the casing and touch against the chain.
That something was a pair of steel nippers, although she did not know it; and she was dismayed the next moment to see the chain fall loosely away from the catch, and to see that the door was swinging open. With one bound she reached the table in the center of the cabin, and with another she passed around it so that it was between her and the door. Then she raised the revolver and pointed it at the pirate.
He came through the doorway and closed it behind him, and then he stood there with his back against it, smiling upon her almost as if he were amused.
“If you make an effort to approach me or to touch me,” she said, and her voice was clear and strong, belying the awful terror that was wringing her heart, “if you come as much as two steps nearer to me than you are now, I will shoot you!”
For a moment he permitted his eyes to dwell upon her face, quizzically, without deigning a reply; it seemed to her that he was weighing what she had said to him, as, indeed, he was doing, though not in the manner she thought.
After a moment he shrugged his shoulders a little and laughed softly.
“Very well,” he said, “shoot me. I assure you that I should not greatly care if you did so.”