“Oh, Master Lafitte!” he gasped in a horrified whisper, his whole frame shaking as if he had the palsy.
“Silence, cur!” hissed the slaveholder, grasping his arm like a vice. “Come with me! Not a word—not a sign—or I’ll dash your brains out.”
Roux, though not a strong nature, was no coward, and under ordinary circumstances, he would have fought to the death for his liberty. But this horrible phantom that had risen upon him! It was not a man—it was Fate—it was the anaconda, and he crushed in the vast and muscular gripe of its folds! The deadening ether of utter horror fell upon him, and passive as one falling from a precipice, with the iron clutch of his master on his arm he moved with him to the door.
At the first step, there was a bounce in the entry, and Tugmutton appeared on the threshold. In less than a second, the blobber-cheeked guffaw-grin of glee fell from the fat face of the broad-limbed Puck into a shock-haired white-eyed stare of goblin terror, and with a shrill yell he vanished. His chattering screech outside was heard by Lafitte just as he got within a yard of the door with his victim, and at the same instant, there was a bound, and Harrington bursting into the room like a thunderbolt, dashed the slaveholder with a crash against the wall.
Roux tottered back and fell prone in a dead swoon. Pale as marble, dilated, regnant, terrible, eyes and nostrils open, Harrington stood over his prostrate body, his front turned in war upon his foe, while Muriel, brave and radiant, sprang like flame into the room by his side.
“Spawn of hell!” howled the Southerner, “you die!”
With the hoarse snarl of a tiger, he came rushing at Harrington, bowie-knife in hand. Muriel would have leaped between her lover and the weapon, but Harrington held her back with his left arm, and stood fronting his enemy with terrible and dauntless eyes, which stopped the infuriated wretch in midcourse like a rampart of swords. Lafitte was brave as a brute is brave, but the Bengal tiger will not spring against a man when his godhood is in his eyes, and arrested by the regal prowess of that bright and fearless gaze, the livid fiend stood all acrouch, the knife gleaming in his hand, his wild-beast orbs drained of their bloody fire, and his breath breaking in gasping snarls on the silence. The next instant he slunk back shivering, and stood with the knife in his nerveless grasp, conquered!
Harrington dropped his arm, which had lain like a bar across the bosom of Muriel, and advanced upon the cowering wretch before him.
“Listen!” said he, in a voice like bronze, deep, solemn and awful. “Listen to those murmurs in the street! Hark!”
In the dead hush, there was a noise like a coming sea, pierced with shrill sounds like the distant screams of the curlew.