"My—baby!" he whispered, while he felt something melt within him and was filled with such an aching joy that he sobbed with the agony of it.
His wife's punishment overflowed when he breathed, fiercely:
"Then give her to me. You can't keep her. You can't touch her. You ain't fit."
She bowed her head in assent, although his torture was nothing as compared with hers.
"You'll help me get away from Barclay, won't you?" she asked, supporting herself unsteadily.
"Barclay! I forgot him! He's the one that did all this, ain't he? He brought you to—this; and my baby, too. He made her live among women like these. He raised her in slime—" The speaker's face became slowly, frightfully distorted.
His wife went swiftly to him; she struggled to fend him away from the door, but he moved irresistibly. They wrestled breathlessly so as not to awaken the child, while she begged him in the baby's name not to go, not to bring blood upon her; but he plucked her arms from around him and went out, closing the door softly.
When he had gone Mrs. McGill stood motionless, her eyes closed, her palms pressed over her ears as if to shut out a sound she dreaded.
Barclay was dealing "bank" in one of the saloons when McGill entered and came toward him down the full length of the room. They recognized each other as their eyes met, and the former sat back stiffly in his chair, feeling that the dead had risen. What he saw written in the face of the bearded man drove the blood from his cheeks, for it was something he had dreaded in his dreams. He knew himself to be cornered, and fear set his nerves to jumping so uncontrollably that when he snatched the Colt's from its drawer and fired blindly, he missed. The place was crowded, and it broke into a frightful confusion at the first shot.
None of those present told the same tale of what immediately followed, but the stories agreed in this, that John Daniels neither hesitated nor quickened his approach, although Barclay emptied his gun so swiftly that the echoes blended, then snapped it on a spent cartridge as the two clinched. Curious ones later searched out the bullet-marks in wall and ceiling which showed beyond doubt the nervous panic under which the gambler had gone to pieces, and so long as the building stood they remained objects of great interest.