“We are down to the primeval passions now,” he pleaded. “Do you suppose if it had been Haley instead of that dago out there who was killed that we could have punished the murderer? Not unless we did it with our own hands. They are maybe lying in wait at the first street-corner now. If you will only wait—”
Keatcham chopped off his sentence without ceremony, not irritably, but with the brusquerie of one whose time is too precious for dilatory amenities.
“Will the fire wait?” he demanded. “Will the thieves and toughs and ruffians whom we have to crush before they realize their strength, will they wait? This is my town, Winter, the only town I care a rap for; and I propose to help save it. I can. Danger? Of course there is danger; there is danger in every battle; but do you keep out of battles where you belong because you may get killed? This is my affair; if I get killed it is in the way of business, and I can’t help it! No, Arnold, I won’t have your father’s son mixed up in my fights; you can’t go.”
“Somebody has to run the machine, sir,” insinuated young Arnold with a coaxing smile; “and I fancy I shouldn’t be my father’s son if I didn’t look after my guest—not very long; he’d cut me out. Tracy is going, too, he’s armed—”
“You are not both going,” said the colonel; “somebody with a head on him must stay here to guard the ladies.”
He would have detailed both Tracy and Mercer; but Mercer could really help Keatcham better than any one in any business arrangements which might need to be made. And Keatcham plainly wished his company. Had not the situation been so grimly serious Winter could have laughed at the grotesque reversal of their conditions; Tracy and Arnold did laugh; they were all taking their orders from the man who had been their defeated prisoner a little while back. Mercer alone kept his melancholy poise; he had obtained the aim of years; he was not sure but his revenge was subtler and completer than he had dared to hope. Being a zealot he was possessed by his dreams. Suppose he had converted this relentless and tremendous power to his own way of faith; what mightn’t he hope to accomplish? Meanwhile, so far as the business in hand was concerned, he believed in Keatcham and in Keatcham’s methods of help; he bowed to the innate power of the man; and he was as simply obedient and loyal as Kito would have been to his feudal lord.
In a very brief time all the arrangements were made; the four men went into the patio to enter the touring-car. They walked up to the empty machine. The colonel stepped into the front seat of the machine. Something in the noise of the engine which was panting and straining against its control, some tiny sibilant undertone which any other ear would have missed, warned his; he bent quickly. A dark object gyrated above the heads of the other two just mounting the long step; it landed with a prodigious splash in the fountain, flying into a multitude of sputtering atoms and hurling a great column of water high up in air. Unheeding its shrieking clamor, the soldier sprang over the side of the car, darted through the great arched doorway out upon the terrace toward a clump of rubber-trees. He fired; again he fired.
In every catastrophe the spectators’ minds lose some parts of the action. There are blanks to be supplied by no one. Every one of the men and women present on that fatal morning had a different story. Colvin was packing; he could only remember the deafening roar and the shouting; and when he got down-stairs and saw—he turned deadly sick; his chief impression is the backs of people and the way their hands would shake. Janet Smith, inside, dressing Haley’s wounds, was first warned by the tumult and cries; she as well as Archie and Haley who were with her could see nothing until they got outside. All Mrs. Melville saw was the glistening back of the car and Mercer stepping into the car and instantly lurching backward. The explosion seemed to her simultaneous with Mercer’s entering the car. But Mrs. Rebecca Winter, who perhaps had the coolest head of all, and who was standing on the dais of the arcade exactly opposite the car, distinctly saw Keatcham with an amazing exertion of vigor for a man just risen from a sick-bed, and with a kind of whirling motion, literally hurl Mercer out of the car. She is sure of this because of one homely little detail, sickening in its very homeliness. As he clutched Mercer Keatcham’s soft gray hat dropped off and the light burnished the bald dome of his head. In the space of that glance she heard a crackle and a roar and Kito screamed in Japanese, running in from the carriage side. She can not tell whether Tracy or Arnold reached the mangled creature on the pavement first. Arnold only remembers how the carriage-robe flapped in Tracy’s shaking hands before he flung it over the man. Tracy’s fair skin was a streaky, bluish white, and his under jaw kept moving up and down like that of a fish out of water, while he gasped, never uttering a sound.
Young Arnold was trembling so that his hands shook when he would have raised the wounded man. Mercer alone was composed although deathly pale. He had the presence of mind to throw the harmless fragments of the bomb into the fountain and to examine the interior of the car lest there should be more of destruction hidden therein. Then he approached the heap on the flags; but Keatcham was able to motion him away, saying in his old voice, not softened in the least: “Don’t you do that! I’m all in. No use. They got me. But it won’t do them any good; you boys know that will you witnessed; it gives a fifty thousand for the arrest and conviction or the killing of Atkins; his own cutthroats will betray him for that. But—where’s Winter? You damn careless fools didn’t let him get hurt?”
“Shure, sor, he didn’t let himsilf git hurted,” Haley blurted out; he had run in after Miss Smith, brandy bottle in hand; “’tis the murdering dagoes is gettin’ hurted off there behind the big rubber-trees; I kin see the dead legs of thim, this minnit. ’Tis a grand cool shot the colonel is, sor.”