"Do you want to hear more?"
The memory of old gossip came back to him. 'He is not the real Virginia Cairy,' some one had said once; 'he has the taint,—that mountain branch of the family,—the mother, you know, they say!' Very slowly Vickers spoke:—
"No decent man would want his sister living with a fellow whose mother—"
As the words fell he could see it coming,—the sudden snatch backwards of the arm, the little pistol not even raised elbow high. And in the drowsy June day, with the flash of the shot, the thought leapt upwards in his clear mind, 'At last I am not impotent—I have saved her!'….
And when he sank back into the meadow grass without a groan, seeing Cairy's face mistily through the smoke, and behind him the blur of the sky, he thought happily, 'She will never go to him, now—never!'—and then his eyes closed.
* * * * *
It was after sunset when some men fishing along the river heard a groan and hunting through the alders and swamp grass found Vickers, lying face down in the thicket. One of the men knew who he was, and as they lifted him from the pool of blood where he lay and felt the stiff fold of his coat, one said:—
"He must have been here some time. He's lost an awful lot of blood! The wound is low down."
They looked about for the weapon in the dusk, and not finding it, took the unconscious man into their boat and started up stream.
"Suicide?" one queried.