Martinez displayed a cutlass, and taking a step forward from the wall, felt the blade with his nail.
“Keep where you are, but be ready,” said Chaves; and he refilled the glass. “Drink. I have told you to drink—and I don’t like to be refused. Drink this to the dregs.”
For the second time Dyke took the glass. He held it high in the candlelight, sniffed at it, and again held it poised.
“Drink. It is good stuff for you. It will save you pain. Drink and forget.”
“Emmie!” Dyke called the name loudly, as he drove the rim of the glass against the bandit’s sunken eyes and flooded them full.
Chaves gave a yell of pain, and, blinded, spluttering, sprang up with his knife. But already Dyke had the wooden stool high in the air; he crashed it down, broke it on Chaves’s head, and sent him senseless to the floor. Turning, he tried to ward off Martinez with the fragments of the stool; but his foot slipped on the wet boards. Martinez cut at him, closed with him, and both went down together, Dyke underneath.
It was all in a moment, this sudden tumult and struggle. Emmie had leaped to the signal, and, half mad with terror, she screamed aloud as Dyke fell. Twice she screamed, in her agony of dread, as the two men fought at her feet. Then some one fired. One after another, three shots were fired, filling the room with smoke, seeming to split the walls with the force of the explosions. And then in the cloud of smoke Dyke was up, gripping her hand, dragging her through the doorway.
“Be quick now. Not that way. Here.” The woman was there. She took Dyke by the arm, led him through the middle room, through her kitchen-bedroom, and out into the cold clean air. Dyke looked round the corner of the house. The horses were no longer there. There were shoutings in the sheds, the men all stirring, roused by the noise.
“Come quick,” said the woman, hurrying them away, chattering as she went. “My husband has the horses ready. My husband is good too. He was set to guard the other door, but he opened it for me.”
They came to the man meekly holding the horses. But pursuit was too close at hand. Some one—Chaves possibly, certainly not Martinez—had recovered sufficiently to unbolt the main door and yell frenzied orders to the gang. One could hear the mules coming out of the sheds. Then the men began to fire their rifles, blindly, down the path towards the high road. It seemed to Dyke that it was too dangerous to use the horses as he had intended. Emmie was in no state to mount and run the gauntlet in the dark. Yet the horses might be useful in another way.