THE KNIFE-THROWER.
With the sleeve of his shirt Dick wiped the blood from his cheek, looked
down at Ockley, and then up at Amaryllis, half-way down the stair.
"That's four. Where's the fifth?" he asked.
"He ran out there," she answered. "You frightened him."
"Come down," said Dick; and when she reached the floor, she found him
kneeling by Melchard, searching his pockets.
She came close and touched him on the shoulder.
"Let's get out of the house--now, now!" she pleaded, lowering her voice
in the presence of so much that looked like death.
"Pocket these," said Dick, handing behind him some letters and a
pocket-book.
With a sharp tug he disengaged the side-pocket wedged between Melchard's
body and the floor, and from it took out a small parcel wrapped in white
paper. Of its two seals one had been broken. He peered into the opened
end.
"Small bottle--white powder," he said.
"That's it," replied Amaryllis. "Do let's go--please."
"Was there anything else?" he asked.
"Oh, do come away. I'm frightened," said the girl, imploring.
"So'm I--badly," said Dick, and rose to his feet.
The letters from Melchard's pocket were still in her hand. He took them,
and picked out a white envelope with no writing on it. The wax seal had
been broken.
He drew from it a sheet of paper, and unfolded it before her.
"That's the formula--it must be," said Amaryllis.
"Let's hook it, then," said Dick, buttoning the package and envelope
into his hip-pocket, and slipping the rest of Melchard's papers into the
side pocket of his own jacket, hanging loosely on Amaryllis.
As they crossed the hall he missed Ockley.
"My God!" he cried. "The black bloke's gone. Did you see him go--or hear
him?"
Amaryllis shook her head.
"I thought I'd given him a five-minute dose at least," said Dick on the
threshold, and taking her left elbow in his hand, began to run. "We've
got to grease like hell. It's a mile and a half to my car."
They were half-way to the pretentious gate, and Amaryllis was already
distressed by the pace, when they heard behind them the thud of a
revolver. A twig with two leaves, cut from a branch above and beyond
them, fell into the road. Dick increased his pace, so that Amaryllis was
only kept from falling by his firm hold of her arm.
A second shot hit the drive behind them, spraying their backs with
gravel.
"High. Low, to left--jump!" yelled Dick, swinging the girl leftward past
his body with a force so sudden that she fell on the grass at the
roadside, in the shelter of an artificial knoll covered with shrubs; and
this time Dick heard the bullet close on his right.
He threw himself on the grass, sharing her cover.
"All right?" he asked.
Speechless for lack of breath, Amaryllis nodded, trying to smile.
"You can't run to the gate," he said, rather as if speaking to himself
than to her. "Wind's gone already, and it's a hundred yards without
cover. To the bank of the road's only about twenty-five. Breathe deep.
Is my cap in that pocket still?"
Amaryllis found and gave it to him. Dick, unrolling it, rose slowly to
his knees, facing the rhododendron bush.
"Oh, don't!" exclaimed the girl.
"Wouldn't, if I'd got a stick. Listen; he's using an Army Webley, I
think. Six shots. He's fired three. If I can draw the second three
before he fills up, it gives us a start while he reloads."
On his knees, he peered through the bush.
"Still at the door," he said. "Breathe deep. On the third shot we go for
the embankment. I'll get you up it. Then over the road. There's timber
that side as well as this."
Again Amaryllis nodded, and Dick, rising a little higher, disposed the
cap between two clumps of leaves, where he hoped it would seem supported
by his head.
"Real G. A. Henty stunt, ain't it?" he said. "But I've shaken him up a
bit, and it's worth trying."
He raised the cap slightly, let it drop back again on the rhododendron
leaves, and laid himself full length on the ground.
"Third shot--if it comes. Breathe deep," he repeated.
There was a pause, agonizing to the girl; and then it came.
Three shots, thumping in rapid succession, the last of them depositing
the cap almost in her hands. Clutching it, she scrambled to her feet,
and Dick, catching her by the arm beneath the shoulder, forced her into
a thirty yards' sprint, in which, while her heart beat as if it would
burst, her feet seemed to touch the ground barely half a dozen times
before the grey stones of the embankment rushed to meet them almost in
the face.
How he managed to force her to the top and bundle her over the parapet,
she could never remember, any more than she could forget Ockley's next
shot, which was discharged as their figures showed against his sky-line
for the two seconds which it took them to cross the road and fling
themselves recklessly down the slope of its other side.
"Brace up," said Dick at the bottom. "You've got some guts, anyhow; and
once we're well into that undergrowth, your hairy friend may come after
us with a Vickers and be damned to him."
To get to it he had to lift her over a swampy patch in a hollow to a
stony place beyond it; whereafter they were soon as well hidden from the
road as its outline lay exposed to the search of their eyes.
But Amaryllis at first left the watching to his, closing her own and
lying still, in sheer womanly terror of being sick. Somewhere within was
a doubt as to whether she did not already adore him, and a pitiable
anxiety that "nothing horrid" should be associated in his mind with her
person.
Dick, lying at full length, turned his eyes every now and again from his
watch on the road to look at the girl's face; and saw, with anxiety as
well as pity, how pale it was, and how wasted already by hunger, fear
and running--and perhaps by the drug they had given her the night
before. He must ask no further exertion of her until she was fed and
rested.
His object was to make his way as quickly as possible to "The Coach and
Horses," his car, and safety.
But he dared not move from this shelter, nor even stand upright, until
he knew what Ockley intended. Already he had tasted the man's quality,
and, with the girl on his hands, held him in healthy fear.
"They've gone too far," he reflected, "to back out."
Had Black Beard been playing 'possum when he ought to have been laid
out? He must, it would seem, have been pretty fit all the time to get
away without making a sound.
Then a thought which sent fear through him like a knife:
"If he saw or heard what we took from that scented swine, no wonder he's
shooting to kill. It's God's judgment on me for a fool--a fool that
believed in peace and policemen. Limping Dick on a gaff like this
without a gun!"
And then he saw a figure, clear against the sky, standing on the road,
at the head of the path by which, three-quarters of an hour ago, he
himself had gone up to get his first view of "The Myrtles."
It was Ockley; even at three hundred yards Dick could distinguish the
black beard and heavy shoulders of the enemy, who was gazing from his
high point, not in the direction of the fugitives, but along the
moorland path to "The Coach and Horses"--the path which lay open to his
eye for its whole length.
"Easy to guess the way I want to go," Dick calculated, "and easier to
see that I haven't dared take it." Then, as Ockley turned his head
towards the trees, "and easiest of all," he added aloud, "to spot the
only cover."
Amaryllis opened her eyes, and he saw that her face was less grey.
"What is it?" she asked.
"The Hairy One," said Dick, "looking for us."
"But he can't see us, can he?"
"No. That's why he knows where we are. He's coming down."
"Don't be worried, Dick," said Amaryllis softly. "You'll get the best of
him again. You've been splendid."
"I've been a fool."
"Why?" she asked.
"To be caught without a gun. I could have killed him."
"Would you?"
"It's he or us."
Her answer surprised him. There was no fear in her face, but sympathy
filled it; and a little colour came.
"Then you will kill him," she said with assurance. "I'll do whatever you
say, and we'll beat him."
Dick nodded. "See those hazels?" he said. "We'll scrounge behind 'em to
start with."
By the time they were settled in the new cover they could hear heavy
feet in the distance, crashing through the low tangle of undergrowth.
And Amaryllis, fear cast out by trust, and her physical prostration for
the moment counteracted by the intensity of her interest in him, and by
her curiosity to see how next his versatility of resource would show
itself, watched Dick's face as he listened to the feet of his enemy.
Each step, she thought, had a different shade of meaning for him. His
left ear seemed to follow, and his eyes seemed to see each stride of the
hunter, and at last he spoke:
"He's working along this side of the embankment. Now he's in the track
that cuts through this copse. We're close to it here--see, through
there, between the beech and the young oak. Hear his feet: stones,
puddle, soft rut," he said rhythmically. "Caught his foot. He's
following the path--going slower--walking, and trying to look both sides
at once in the undergrowth."
A pause, and then he said, with a jerk:
"Take that coat off."
Amaryllis obeyed, and lay still.
Beside the rutted cart-track, a few yards from where they lay, was a
pile of brushwood, cut and stacked for fuel. From this, with a cautious
eye and ear on the bend where the track twisted out of sight in the
direction of the high road, he took an armful of sticks and twigs and
buttoned round it the Norfolk jacket. He tore grass in great handfuls
and stuffed the ends of the sleeves, Amaryllis helping eagerly as she
seized his purpose.
He next took the Dutchwoman's knife from the dummy's pocket and dragged
the rude torso to the side of the woodstack furthest from the expected
approach, pushing it out across the track, so that, buttons downward,
with left arm extended beyond the head which was not there, the right
doubled beneath the breast, and the thrice-perforated cap, with a bunch
of grass beneath it, dropped within the bend of the supposed left elbow,
and the non-existence of legs concealed by the wood-pile, it might well
be mistaken, by one coming down the wheel-track from the road, for a man
stricken or sleeping.
Behind them was a small, deep hollow, where the ancient stump of some
great tree had rotted.
"Get down there," said Dick. "Don't stand, roll in and curl up."
And the last she saw of him as she obeyed, was the back of the black
head and the blue shirt, rising erect some ten yards up the track from
the wood-pile, making themselves small behind the largest tree-trunk in
sight, and the gently swaying right hand poising in its palm Dutch
Fridji's knife.
Then she obeyed orders, curled up in her musty lair, and prayed.
Heavily nearer came the footsteps--walking--walking--walking--until the
girl feared she must cry out or faint. She bit through a lump of the
handkerchief he had tied round her neck for a stomacher--and then kissed
it.
Suddenly came a hoarse voice, foul words uttered in furious exultation,
and the feet were running--nearer--nearer--and once more--twice--the
thumping note of the big revolver.
Oh! the end was coming. Her breast was squeezed in, and her head
bursting. Hardly knowing what she did, she peered over the edge of the
beastly, uncovered little grave, just in time to see the black brute,
red-faced, in the cart-track; to see the blue arm swing, and a long
glitter in the air between them; to hear a horrible sound and see what
sent her back into her hole, with hands over eyes to shut out what was
already inside.
And then Dick's voice, and his hand helping her out.
Standing up, she looked at him. In his face there was no blood under the
brown, but his eyes were more content than she had seen them since just
before she opened the letter from Melchard--a hundred years ago.
Her eyes asked him the question she could not put into words, and he
nodded.
"You said I should, you know."
"You just had to, Dick," she answered.
He looked at her keenly.
"You're beat," he said. "Food's what you want; but 'The Coach and
Horses' over there, where I left my car, is the only place. We must go a
bit out of our way to keep out of sight of their damned house."
He went to the dummy to free the coat of its stuffing.
While he bent over, Amaryllis, fascinated yet repelled by what she could
just perceive lying in the path, crept towards it--and wished she had
not.
She was turning away when her eye was caught by a dull blue gleam from
something in the grass beyond the body lying face downward in the deeply
rutted track; and there grew in the dazed mind of the girl an impulse to
see what it might be.
Averting her eyes from the dead body, she stepped delicately, as if
fearing to wake it, to the other side of the way, and picked up the
revolver which Ockley had dropped in his fall.
Her heart gave a great pulse of delight. This was a thing which Dick
needed, and Dick must have everything he desired.
With an exclamation of pleasure she turned to take it straight to him,
forgetting the fearful thing in the road; seeing it but just in time to
avoid stumbling.
At her feet was the back of the dead man's head, the face wedged into
the wheel-rut, with the beard pushed up between the left cheek and the
hardened edge of mud. The channel of the rut, where she could see down
into it between ear and shoulder, seemed full of the blood which had
dyed the shirt-collar and the shoulder of the coat.
And aimed at her eyes, like an accusing finger, there stuck out from the
hairy neck the point of Dutch Fridji's knife.
An absurd sense of guilt, maudlin pity for mere death, and dread of the
unknown, crowding in cruel rivalry to destroy her weakened self-control,
sent her staggering to Dick over ground which seemed to rise and fall
like the sea. For she was keeping hold on common sense by the thought
that there was something that Dick wanted--what, she had forgotten--but
she had it, and he must have it.
He had seen her bending over Ockley, and went to meet her.
Dimly she saw him, and stretched out her hands, lifting the pistol.
"It's for you," she said; and fainted, falling forward into his arms.