He stepped toward the angel and gently lifted her blood-dripping hand.
The chain had sunk right into the soft flesh. The angel, with a smile
and a movement with her left hand, gave us to understand that the hurt
was nothing.
The next moment she gave an exclamation and gazed past me and down the
pillared cavern.
Instantly I turned, and, as I did so, I too exclaimed.
There, far off amongst the sinister columns, two yellow, wrathful
lights were gleaming. And soon we saw them--dark hurrying figures
moving towards us.
Chapter 22
WHAT DID IT MEAN?
"The help is coming, Bill," said Milton Rhodes. "And that reminds me: I
haven't reloaded my revolver."
"I would lose no time in doing so," I told him.
He got out the weapon and proceeded to reload it. It was not, by the
way, one of these new-fangled things but one of your old-fashioned
revolvers--solid, substantial, one that would stand hard usage,
a piece to be depended upon. And that it seemed was just what we
needed--weapons to be depended upon.
The angel was watching Rhodes closely. I wondered if she knew what had
killed her demon; knew, I mean, that this metal thing, with its glitter
so dull and so cold, was a weapon. It was extremely unlikely that she
had, in that horrible moment on the bridge, seen what actually had
happened. However that might have been, it was soon plain that she
recognized the revolver as a weapon, or, at any rate, guessed that it
was.
With an interjection, she stepped to Rhodes' side, and, with swift
pantomime, she assured us that there was nothing at all to apprehend
from those advancing figures.
"After all," Milton said, slipping the revolver into his pocket,
"why should we be so infernally suspicious? Maybe this world is very
different from our own."
"That's just what I'm afraid of. And it seems to me," I added, my right
hand in that pocket which contained my revolver, "that we have good
cause to be suspicious. Have you forgotten what grandfather Scranton
saw up there at the Tamahnowis Rocks (and what he didn't see) and the
death there, so short a time since, of Rhoda Dillingham, to say nothing
of what happened to us here a few minutes ago? That we are not at the
bottom of that chasm--well, I am not anxious to have another shave like
that."
"I have not, of course, forgotten any of that, Bill. I have an idea,
though, that those tragedies up there were purely accidental. Certainly
we know that the demon's attack upon ourselves was entirely so."
"Accidental? Great Scott, some consolation that."
I looked at Milton Rhodes, and I looked at the angel, who had taken a
few steps forward and was awaiting those hurrying figures--a white-clad
figure, still and tall, one lovely, majestic. And, if I didn't sigh, I
certainly felt like doing so.
"No demon there, Bill," observed Milton at last, his eyes upon those
advancing forms.
"I see none. Four figures. I see no more than four."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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