But, on the instant, the smile froze on his face. It was as if he had felt the cold, grey gaze of Henderson on the back of his neck. Some warning, certainly, was flashed to that mysterious sixth sense which the people of the wild, man or beast, seem sometimes to be endowed with. He wheeled like lightning, his revolver seeming to leap up from his belt with the same motion. But in the same fraction of a second that his eyes met Henderson’s they met the white flame-spurt of Henderson’s rifle––and then, the dark.
As Pichot’s body collapsed, it toppled over the rim into Blackwater Pot and fell across two moving logs. Mitchell had thrown up his hands straight above his head when Pichot fell, knowing instantly that that was his only hope of escaping the same fate as his leader’s.
One look at Henderson’s face, however, satisfied him that he was not going to be dealt with on the spot, and he set his thick jaw stolidly. Then his eyes wandered down into the pot, following the leader whom, in his way, he had loved if ever he had loved any one or anything. Fascinated, his stare followed the two logs as they journeyed around, with Pichot’s limp form, face upwards, sprawled 191 across them. They reached the cleft, turned, and shot forth into the raving of the sluice, and a groan of horror burst from “Bug’s” lips. By this Henderson knew what had happened, and, to his immeasurable self-scorn, a qualm of remembered fear caught sickeningly at his heart. But nothing of this betrayed itself in his face or voice.
“Come on, Mitchell!” he said, briskly. “I’m in a hurry. You jest step along in front, an’ see ye keep both hands well up over yer head, or ye’ll be savin’ the county the cost o’ yer rope. Step out, now.”
He stood aside, with Sis at his elbow, to make room. As Mitchell passed, his hands held high, a mad light flamed up into his sullen eyes, and he was on the point of springing, like a wolf, at his captor’s throat. But Henderson’s look was cool and steady, and his gun held low. The impulse flickered out in the brute’s dull veins. But as he glanced at Sis he suddenly understood that it was she who had brought all this to pass. His black face snarled upon her like a wolf’s at bay, with an inarticulate curse more horrible than any words could make it. With a shiver the child slipped behind Henderson’s back and hid her face.
“Don’t be skeered o’ him, kid, not one little mite,” said Henderson, gently. “He ain’t agoin’ to trouble this earth no more. An’ I’m goin’ to get 192 yer father a job, helpin’ me, down somewheres near Greensville––because I couldn’t sleep nights knowin’ ye was runnin’ round anywheres near that hell-hole yonder!”
The Iron Edge of Winter
The glory of the leaves was gone; the glory of the snow was not yet come; and the world, smitten with bitter frost, was grey like steel. The ice was black and clear and vitreous on the forest pools. The clods on the ploughed field, the broken hillocks in the pasture, the ruts of the winding backwoods road, were hard as iron and rang under the travelling hoof. The silent, naked woods, moved only by the bleak wind drawing through them from the north, seemed as if life had forgotten them.