The blood was flowing hot over his face. He made no effort to staunch it or even to feel with his fingers to find exactly where or how badly he had been hit. He jerked the empty cartridge clip from his pistol butt and snapped in the other. He swept his sleeve over his face to clear the blood from his brows and eyes and stared through the dark with pistol at arm's-length loaded and ready. Blood spurted over his face again; another sweep of his sleeve cleared it; and he moved his pistol-point back and forth in the dark. The flash of the firing from the other two revolvers had stopped; the roar of the shots had ceased to deafen. Eaton had not counted the shots at him any better than he had kept track of his own firing; but he knew now that the other two must have emptied their magazines as well as he. It was possible, of course, that he had killed one of them or wounded one mortally; but he had no way to know that. He could hear the click as one of the men snapped his revolver shut again after reloading; then another click came. Both the others had reloaded.
"All right?" the voice which Eaton knew questioned the other.
"All right," came the reply.
But, if they were all right, they made no offer to fire first again. Nor yet did they dare to move. Eaton knew they lay on the floor like himself. They lay with fingers on trigger, as he also lay, waiting again for him to move so they could shoot at him. But surely now the sound of the firing in that room must have reached the man in the room above; surely he must be summoning his servants!
Eaton listened; there was still no sound from the rest of the house. But overhead now, he heard an almost imperceptible pattering—the sound of a bare-footed man crossing the floor; and he knew that the blind man in the bedroom above was getting up.
CHAPTER XVIII
UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS
Basil Santoine was oversensitive to sound, as are most of the blind; in the world of darkness in which he lived, sounds were by far the most significant—and almost the only—means he had of telling what went on around him; he passed his life in listening for or determining the nature of sounds. So the struggle which ended in Eaton's crash to the floor would have waked him without the pistol-shot immediately following. That roused him wide-awake immediately and brought him sitting up in bed, forgetful of his own condition.
Santoine at once recognized the sound as a shot; but in the instant of waking, he had not been able to place it more definitely than to know that it was close. His hand went at once to the bellboard, and he rang at the same time for the nurse outside his door and for the steward. But for a few moments after that first shot, nothing followed; there was silence. Santoine was not one of those who doubt their hearing; that was the sense in which the circumstances of his life made him implicitly trust; he had heard a shot near by; the fact that nothing more followed did not make him doubt it; it made him think to explain it.