“Thank God!” ejaculated Somerville. “But I will not talk with you. You’d talk here till morning. Where is the girl?”
The creole laughed devilishly with his steel-gray eyes, and the scout gritted his teeth with rage and disappointment.
“Then here ends your accursed villainies!” he cried. “If Kate is dead, I’ll avenge her; if living I’ll find her without you to baffle me.”
The lips closed with determined emphasis over the last word, and a second later the shining steel descended.
It entered the broad breast of the Yellow Bloodhound, and with a shriek, scarce half-human, he sprung upward, hurling our hero from him as if he were a child. Upon his feet, the fiend reeled a moment as though he would fall, and then, seemingly having gained control of himself, he wheeled and darted toward the creek from which he had lately emerged.
It was the pain shot throughout his body by the penetrating steel that drove him to his feet, and soon, no doubt, he would fall, like the death-wounded stag, when the gush of strength had spent its force.
The scout noted the effect of his blow with a cry of horror, and darted after the wounded creole, determined to put an end to the life he had but partially stricken.
The Yellow Bloodhound gained the deep creek a yard or two in advance of his pursuer, and plunged in. He sunk immediately, for his strength seemed to have deserted him; but a minute later he rose to the surface of the blood-tinged water, a short distance below the spot where Bob Somerville stood.
“Ha! there he is!” cried the young man, and he darted down-stream, with his eyes fastened upon his foe.
A minute later the avenging knife might have found the heart it had missed a moment before, had not a dark object sprung from the rushes, almost beneath the scout’s very feet, and a red hand griped his arm.