"Mack, you're not Hutton—you never took those emeralds—and for that girl! Say it's a lie, and it's I you love! Mack, say you love me still!"
Macartney flung back a mechanical hand and swept her away from him like a fly. She fell and lay there. None of us had said a word since Dudley came out and faced Macartney. None of us said a word now. I saw, almost indifferently, Collins burst out of the burrow behind Macartney, as Marcia had burst out, and grab me. "Stretton," he gasped, "thank God—found your tracks. But that she-devil Marcia got away from me, and——" But in his turn he jerked taut where he stood, at sight of Dudley, and stood speechless.
But I never looked at him. I looked at nothing but Macartney's face.
It was rigid, as if it were a mask that had frozen on him. The sealing-wax scarlet on his cheeks had gone out like a turned-out lamp. His eyes went from Dudley to Collins and back again, as if they were the only living part of his deathly face.
"Ah," said Macartney, "A-ah!" He dropped on the floor all in one piece, like a cut-down tree.
Collins made a plunge for him. I sent Collins reeling.
"Let him alone, you young fool," I swore. "We've got him, and he's fainted. I've seen him like this before—the night he shot our own men in the assay office. It's only his old fainting fits."
"It's his new death," said Dudley, quite quietly. He came forward and bent over Macartney, laid a hand on his breast. "Can't you see the man's gone, Stretton? It killed him: the run here—the shock of seeing me. He must have had a heart like rotten quartz!"
Paulette, Collins, Baker, all of us, stood there blankly. We had not struck a blow, or raised a voice among the whole lot of us; Macartney's gun was still warm from his grasp whence I had snatched it; and Macartney—the secret wolf at La Chance, masquerader, thief, murderer—lay dead at our feet. I heard myself say out loud: "His heart was rotten: that was why he fainted in the assay office. But——Oh, the man was mad besides! He must have been." And over my words came another voice. It was Marcia's, and it made me sick.
"Macartney," she was screaming, "Macartney!" She ran round and round like a hen in a road, before me, Dudley, all of us; then flung herself on her brother as if she had only just realized him. "You're alive—you're not dead! Can't you see he never stole any emeralds nor loved that girl, any more than he killed you? You made up lies about him, all of you! And you stand here doing nothing for him. He——Oh, Mack, speak to me! Mack!"