“So … And now” (this after a prolonged silence, wherein the four men stood facing each other), “is it a blood-matter, if not of peace?”
“Ay. Go, if you are wise. If not, ’tis your own death you will be making.”
There was a flash as of summer lightning. A bluish flame seemed to leap through the moonshine. Marcus reeled, with a gasping cry; then, leaning back till his face blanched in the moonlight, his knees gave way. As he fell, he turned half round. The long knife which Mànus had hurled at him had not penetrated his breast more than two inches at most, but as he fell on the deck it was driven into him up to the hilt.
In the blank silence that followed, the three men could hear a sound like the ebb-tide in sea-weed. It was the gurgling of the bloody froth in the lungs of the dead man.
The first to speak was his brother, and then only when thin reddish-white foam-bubbles began to burst from the blue lips of Marcus.
“It is murder.”
He spoke low, but it was like the surf of breakers in the ears of those who heard.
“You have said one part of a true word, Gloom Achanna. It is murder … that you and he came here for.”
“The death of Marcus Achanna is on you, Mànus MacCodrum.”
“So be it, as between yourself and me, or between all of your blood and me; though Aulay MacNeill as well as you can witness that, though in self-defence I threw the knife at Achanna, it was his own doing that drove it into him.”