Jesse James' Bold Stroke; Or, The Double Bank RobberyWard, William (Author at Arthur Westbrook Co. (Cleveland, Ohio))
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Jesse James' Bold Stroke; Or, The Double Bank Robbery
Ward, William (Author at Arthur Westbrook Co. (Cleveland, Ohio))
James, Jesse, 1847-1882 -- Fiction; Western stories
"If my hands only were free," he growled. "Ah, I have it. I'll try it,"
he gritted, with blazing eyes.
Quickly the outlaw rolled back to them. Now he was bent on a terrible
revenge. And he forgot for the moment his own deadly peril in his
ferocious desire to be revenged on Great Bear.
With as much speed as his manacled condition would permit, the great
outlaw worked his head along the body of the Indian nearest to him.
Not finding what he sought at first, he braced his feet with great
difficulty and putting forth an almost superhuman effort, pushed and
pushed against the redskin with his head, until the savage had been
rolled over. The deed, however, had required a supreme effort.
The Indian squirmed and muttered surlily, but to the desperado's
intense relief, did not awake.
Jesse searched at the side he had just turned up, and with a savage
exclamation of delight, bit hard at the Indian's waist.
The desperado's face came away with the redskin's bowie between his
teeth.
The outlaw could have shouted, so great was his joy. After laborious
effort he succeeded in setting the keen-edged blade more firmly between
his teeth, so that only the hilt was held by them.
Cautiously he squirmed and wriggled until his head and shoulders were
over the body of the redskin whom he had again rolled over on his back.
The great desperado, still holding the knife in a vice-like grip
between his teeth, twisted his head at right angles to his body and set
the needle-like point of the blade, on the Indian's abdomen.
The cruel blood-thirstiness of what he was about to do made no
impression on him, for Jesse was bent on a terrible vengeance. And it
was a moment of supreme ecstasy for the bandit-chieftain, bound and
manacled and helpless as he was.
Suddenly throwing the weight of his body on his toes and neck, the
deadly bowie, by the sheer force of the outlaw's own weight, was driven
into the Indian's bowels while the blood in a sudden red sheet, spurted
into his mouth and eyes.
The redskin sprang almost clear of the ground, then settled back with
a heavy groan, his stupor too heavy to resist the work of the vengeful
blade.
With a fiendish light in his eyes the desperado gloated over the death
throes of the unconscious savage, whose writhings, whose agonized
twistings and muscular contractions, sent the outlaw into an ecstasy of
delirious joy.
After a little, the Indian stiffened out and lay still.
"One!" snarled the desperado.
Once more the avenging outlaw crawled laboriously to his victim. And
that despite the fact that every moment's delay placed his own life
more and more in jeopardy.
Now came the most difficult part of his task. The bowie, driven in to
its keen-edged limit, was tightly wedged in the body of the dead savage.
With feverish haste, the world's greatest desperado again buried his
face in the awful pool of blood.
His teeth closed over the slippery hilt of the blade.
But it stubbornly resisted all his efforts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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