CHAPTER X
MURDER
ANNETTE’S pony snatched at its bit and halted. And the mud-brown mare came to a stand responsively. The eyes into which Stanley Fyles found himself gazing were shining in the cold brilliance of the moonlight. Annette was listening.
Fyles found himself listening, too.
Annette’s effect on him was wholly extraordinary. It had begun at their first meeting on the trail. And the more he had considered her since, the more surely had it grown. There was her beauty, which could not fail to intrigue his manhood. That was inevitable. But it gave him no sense of pleasure. On the contrary, it inspired him with a feeling of greater repugnance. In his mind it conflicted so hideously with the savage bitterness with which she was pursuing what he understood to be her sheer revenge. The mercilessness in her he felt to be something verging on the terrible. It belonged to a fiend rather than a beautiful woman. And yet all the time there was something about her which found him doubting, even incredulous. It was as though she, herself, were unreal. As though every moment he spent with her were part of some ugly dream from which he would eventually awaken. It was monstrously unbelievable to him that even now he was on his way with her to discover the murdered body of Sinclair.
Yet he had no doubt of her truth. He was without a shadow of doubt of her story. It was just the girl herself and his own sensibilities reacting to the ugly thing she was doing. Then, furthermore, back of his mind lay urgent wonder that here, in something less than twenty-four hours, he was on the threshold of discovery. The riddle whose solution had looked like days and weeks of laborious effort was resolving itself as if he were turning the pages of an open book.
Annette’s tones came low and whispering.
“It’s coyotes,” she said. “I thought——”
“We left them all back in the town. Your menfolk were asleep in their blankets. You said so. Who else could be around out here in the hills—now?”
Fyles spoke sharply.
“Yes.”