"I'll make you sorrier!" Rafe exclaimed and without more ado cast both arms around her.
He was striving to kiss her and she, face crushed against his rough shirt, fought him like the primeval female every woman becomes in like circumstances. Her right hand clawed upward at his face. Her left arm, doubled between their two bodies, she strove to work free so that she could grab his gun.
Rafe received three distinct clawings that considerably altered the appearance of one side of his face, before he was able to confine those active fingers.
"Here!" he bawled in a fury. "I'll fix you!"
He tried to seize her by the throat and his thumb slipped by mistake into her mouth. She promptly clamped down hard on the thumb. With a yell, Rafe released his grip on her body and worked a thumb and ring finger into her cheeks in a frantic effort to force open her locked jaws.
Suddenly she opened her mouth. Rafe sprang back a yard, shaking a bleeding thumb and swearing, and as he sprang she dragged the six-shooter from his holster.
Her palm swept down to cock the gun. But Rafe was as quick to see his danger as Dan Slike had been. He made a long arm as he hurled himself at her and knocked the barrel to one side at the moment of the shot. Before she could fire again, he had torn the weapon from her grasp and flung it across the room.
"You tried to murder me!" he panted. "You tried to murder me!"
She dived headlong beneath his arm, but he caught the slack of her overalls as she went by and dragged her to a standstill. She immediately butted him in the stomach with her head. He stumbled back but caught her arm. Her head flashed down and her teeth fastened on his wrist. Again he broke the grip of her teeth by the application of ring finger and thumb to her cheeks, and then he reached purposefully for her throat and began to strangle her in dead earnest.
She kicked and thrashed about like a wild thing in a trap,—as indeed she was. Her nails scratched desperately at his arms. She might as well have been petting him. Tighter and tighter became the choking grasp of those long fingers. She could not breathe. Her temples were bursting. Her head felt like a balloon. With her last flare-up of failing strength, she kicked him on the knee-cap.