While he bent over, Amaryllis, fascinated yet repelled by what she could just perceive lying in the path, crept towards it—and wished she had not.
She was turning away when her eye was caught by a dull blue gleam from something in the grass beyond the body lying face downward in the deeply rutted track; and there grew in the dazed mind of the girl an impulse to see what it might be.
Averting her eyes from the dead body, she stepped delicately, as if fearing to wake it, to the other side of the way, and picked up the revolver which Ockley had dropped in his fall.
Her heart gave a great pulse of delight. This was a thing which Dick needed, and Dick must have everything he desired.
With an exclamation of pleasure she turned to take it straight to him, forgetting the fearful thing in the road; seeing it but just in time to avoid stumbling.
At her feet was the back of the dead man's head, the face wedged into the wheel-rut, with the beard pushed up between the left cheek and the hardened edge of mud. The channel of the rut, where she could see down into it between ear and shoulder, seemed full of the blood which had dyed the shirt-collar and the shoulder of the coat.
And aimed at her eyes, like an accusing finger, there stuck out from the hairy neck the point of Dutch Fridji's knife.
An absurd sense of guilt, maudlin pity for mere death, and dread of the unknown, crowding in cruel rivalry to destroy her weakened self-control, sent her staggering to Dick over ground which seemed to rise and fall like the sea. For she was keeping hold on common sense by the thought that there was something that Dick wanted—what, she had forgotten—but she had it, and he must have it.
He had seen her bending over Ockley, and went to meet her.
Dimly she saw him, and stretched out her hands, lifting the pistol.