“Gastineau, with a great backward spring, reached a practical firing distance.”
With a swift sense of relief at his deliverance, Herriard, trembling from the horror of the business, looked over the edge of the tower. Below, where they had fallen, layman and dog in their blood, and without sign of life. Gastineau’s grey face, with eyes that, through the mean disguise, seemed to glare up at him with a vindictiveness that death could not kill, was the face of a dead man. Herriard instinctively knew that. He drew back, and went softly down the winding stairs of the tower. On a table in the lower room lay his gun. The cartridges had been extracted. He slipped others in, and went outside.
The first thing he saw was his revolver which Gastineau had made him throw away. He took it up, and went on round the tower towards the place he dreaded. There they lay; his enemy and his preserver; still, as only they lie who will never move again. A glance now sufficed to tell Herriard that his fears were at an end.
Nerving himself with the remembrance of his late danger, he stooped and raised Gastineau’s head, the head that had plotted such evil against him, and which now lay twisted unnaturally away from his shoulders; then he gently let it rest on the stones again. The dead man’s neck was broken. Bar accidents, he had said; and already, by a swift, dramatic stroke, the accident had come. Fate had, in an instant, brushed away the carefully spun web of the ambitious, relentless schemer. With a sigh, and with a caressing touch for poor Fritz, Herriard turned from the shattered abode of that master-spirit who had been so strangely both friend and enemy such as few men have owned; and took his way towards home and Alexia, a free man.
A New Romance of Old Quebec
IN
TREATY WITH HONOR
By MARY CATHERINE CROWLEY
Author of “A Daughter of New France,” “The Heroine of the
Strait,” etc.
Illustrated by Clyde O. De Land. 12mo. Decorated Cloth.
$1.50.
This romance of old Quebec is full of human interest. Its events have to do with a stirring and intensely dramatic episode never before touched upon by any novelist, the Patriot War, or Struggle of French Canada for Independence in 1837-38.