He was conscious, through his trance of fear and horror, of screams rising eerily through the night. He took his hand from her mouth long enough to rip out her silken sleeve, stuff it into her mouth, and bind it there with his bandana.
She came to herself then, and fought like a wildcat as he tried to bind her hands and feet. It was half a minute before he succeeded.
He did not wait to bind her feet, but hurried back toward those screams, careless of the blackness of the passageway. He ran into the table in the dining-room, and blundered toward the kitchen. The screams rose in a crescendo of utter terror as he approached.
Moonlight filtered through the windows of the tiny bedroom, and by its dim illumination he could see the whites of staring eyes in the corner behind the bed. He jerked the gibbering old negro to her feet and his fist crashed to her jaw. He ripped and tore at the bed-sheets like a wild man, finally securing strips that answered for a gag and strands to secure arms and legs.
He ran back to the office, to fall over the prone body of the old man. He rolled away from it as if from some living menace. He scrambled to his feet, his breath coming in labored gasps, and turned toward Judith, whom he had flung in the chair before the desk. She was limp, her face still set in lines that seemed frozen in agony. He finished his task of binding her.
With the cash-box in his arms, Buchanan fled. It was the work of a moment to enter the small corral, fling the saddle that hung in the shed on the back of Judith’s saddle-horse, and mount.
The whispering mesquit was the voice of phantom pursuers, the solitude terrible.
He galloped to the little shack depot, and let himself in by smashing a window. The moon-rays through a window gave enough light to enable him to smash the telegraph instruments and the telephone.
Then, without food or water, he set off at a wild gallop southward. His convulsed face was twisted backward over his shoulder as if he expected the blurred buildings behind him to give forth some avenger to follow him through the shadows reaching for him from every side.
Captain Perkins was sprawled in the swinging hammock on the porch of the recreation building, puffing deliberately at a short pipe. It was a little after ten o’clock in the evening. Presently the sheriff happened along.