"One little, white hand—" Wolfe interrupted in a terrible voice. He could govern himself no longer—he straightened on his sound leg and sprang, his hands before his eyes to protect them from the powder. There was an oath from the lips of Mayfield, and immediately afterward came a great flash and a great roar. Wolfe found himself groping in a stifling white cloud of powder smoke—but he had not been burned in the least degree!
He dropped to his hands and knees and peered under the slowly-lifting cloud. He saw Cat-Eye Mayfield lying supine on the floor, with the old shotgun across his narrow chest. He crept forward, meaning to kill the unspeakable reptile with his bare hands—meaning to strangle the wicked life out.
When he reached Mayfield, he saw that the shotgun, which had been loaded beyond its power of resistance, had split for eight inches at the breech—and Mayfield's lean face was burned as black as that of an Ethiopian; his eyes were perfectly and incurably blind! The monster of his own foul brain's creation had turned upon him.
Wolfe uttered a cry that makes the finest description puny. He seized the other's slender throat in a viselike grip. The blind eyes stared toward him. Then he recalled the words of Tot.
"Even the blood of a snake is red."
His hands left Mayfield's neck. He rose and limped out of the cabin, and went to the big beech that stood beside Tot's beautiful Lake of Peace. There he saw many of his wife's small footprints in the snow——
Lying in the edge of the water, he found a dark blue shawl that she had been wont to wear about her shoulders when the weather was cold. Beside it lay a tortoise-shell comb. A branch that hung low over the lake had kept for him a few strands of hair that was of the color of dark copper. He wrung the water from the shawl and put it, with the other little treasures, on the snow beside him. Almost he wished, now, that he had killed Mayfield——
A sudden weird, skittering shriek split the air like a knife. He turned his head quickly. Through the mist of his sorrow he saw blind Cat-Eye Mayfield rushing toward the lake. Mayfield's thin lips were parted and jerking; his blackened face was contorted and hideous. No man may be himself when he has suffered as young Wolfe had suffered; Wolfe laughed thickly, oddly, mimicking the hoarse laugh that was Mayfield's.
"Haw-haw-haw!"
The sightless man fell to his hands and knees and began to grope for the edge of the lake. Soon he had found it. Then he straightened and turned his hideous face—a singular thing, and inexplicable—as squarely toward Little Buck Wolfe as though he had eyes to see him.