An hour later, Felice, roused from her sleep by loud knocking upon her
door, threw a blanket about her slim body, serape fashion, and opened
the cabin to two gaunt scarecrows, who, the one, half supported by the
other, himself far spent and all but swooning, lurched by her across the
threshold and brought up wavering and bloody in the midst of the cabin
floor.
"_Por Dios! Por Dios!_" cried Felice. "Ah, love of God! what misfortune
has befallen Chino!" Then in English, and with a swift leap of surprise
and dismay: "Ah, Meester Lockwude, air you hurt? Eh, tell me-a! Ah, it
is too draidful!"
"No, no," gasped Lockwood, as he dragged Chino's unconscious body to the
bed Felice had just left. "No; I--I've shot him. We met--there on the
trail." Then the nerves that had stood strain already surprisingly long
snapped and crisped back upon themselves like broken harp-strings.
"_I've shot him! I've shot him!_" he cried. "Shot him, do you
understand? Killed him, it may be. Get the doctor, quick! He's at the
office. I passed Chino on the trail over to the Hill. He'd hid in the
bushes as he heard me coming from behind, then when I came back I took
him. Oh, I'll explain later. Get the doctor, quick."
Felice threw on such clothes as came to her hand and ran over to the
office, returning with the doctor, half dressed and blinking in the
lantern-light. He went in to the wounded man at once, and Lockwood, at
the end of all strength, dropped into the hammock on the porch,
stretching out his leg to ease the anguish of his broken foot. He leaned
back and closed his eyes wearily, aware only of a hideous swirl of pain,
of intolerable anxiety as to Chino's wound, and, most of all, of a mere
blur of confusion wherein the sights and sounds of the last few hours
tore through his brain with the plunge of a wild galloping such as
seemed to have been in his ears for years and years.
But as he lay thus he heard a step at his side. Then came the touch of
Felice's long brown hand upon his face. He sat up, opening his eyes.
"You aisk me-a," she said, "eef I do onderstaind, eh? Yais, I
onderstaind. You--" her voice was a whisper--"you shoot Chino, eh? I
know. You do those thing' for me-a. I am note angri, no-a. You ver'
sharp man, eh? All for love oaf Felice, eh? Now we be happi, maybe; now
we git married soam day byne-by, eh? Ah, you one brave man, Sigñor
Lockwude!"
She would have taken his hand, but Lockwood, the pain all forgot, the
confusion all vanishing, was on his feet. It was as though a curtain
that for months had hung between him and the blessed light of clear
understanding had suddenly been rent in twain by her words. The woman
stood revealed. All the baseness of her tribe, all the degraded savagery
of a degenerate race, all the capabilities for wrong, for sordid
treachery, that lay dormant in her, leaped to life at this unguarded
moment, and in that new light, that now at last she had herself let in,
stood pitilessly revealed, a loathsome thing, hateful as malevolence
itself.
"What," shouted Lockwood, "you think--think that I--that I
_could_--oh-h, it's monstrous--_you_----" He could find no words to
voice his loathing. Swiftly he turned away from her, the last spark of
an evil love dying down forever in his breast.
It was a transformation, a thing as sudden as a miracle, as conclusive
as a miracle, and with all a miracle's sense of uplift and power. In a
second of time the scales seemed to fall from the man's eyes, fetters
from his limbs; he saw, and he was free.
At the door Lockwood met the doctor:
"Well?"
"He's all right; only a superficial wound. He'll recover. But you--how
about you? All right? Well, that is a good hearing. You've had a lucky
escape, my boy."
"I _have_ had a lucky escape," shouted Lockwood. "You don't know just
how lucky it was."