Carelessly, without any special interest, he saw a man entering the cut two hundred yards in front of him. He glanced at his watch. The time was 5:49. He would be more than twenty minutes late for his appointment with Vicky.
Hugh rode into the cut. Halfway through it he pulled up his horse abruptly. The crack of a rifle had stopped him automatically. He swung from the saddle and eased the revolver in its scabbard. The sound of another shot echoed in the cut. A scream shrilled through the dusk.
He tied the horse to a sapling with a slip knot and stepped forward. He guessed that murder had been done. The shriek that still rang in his brain had come from a man in mortal agony. Warily as a panther he moved, for he knew the murderer had a rifle, and against a rifle at a hundred yards a forty-five is as effective as a popgun.
Hugh edged round the corner of the bend beyond the cut. Instantly caution vanished. In the gathering gloom a woman was flying down the road toward him. She flung herself down to gather up in her arms a figure lying sprawled across the path. McClintock broke into a run. Even in the growing darkness he had recognized that light and lissom form.
“Vicky!” he cried as he reached her.
A face bloodless to the lips looked up pitifully at him. In the eyes he read amazement, incredulity, doubt. Then, quite without warning, the girl quietly toppled over in a dead faint.
CHAPTER XLIII
THE SACRIFICE
Vicky floated back to consciousness and a world that for a moment did not relate itself to her previous experience. Hugh McClintock’s arms were round her, his anxious face looking into hers. The touch of the night wind was in the air, and apparently she was lying on the ground.
“Where am I?” she asked.