American fiction -- 20th century; Gold mines and mining -- Fiction; Western stories
She ran like a deer. The moment that she broke into headlong flight
that very act released within her a full tide of fright; it became a
panic like that of soldiers once they have thrown down their arms and
plunged into the delirium of disordered retreat. She ran as she had
never done before, even when she and Babe Deveril had fled through the
night. And Bruce Standing would never have come up with her that night
had it not been that in the dark she fell, stumbling over the low mound
left to mark the place where an ancient log had disintegrated. As she
floundered to her feet she felt his hand on her shoulder. She screamed,
she struck at him....
He caught her two hands as he had done once before; she could have no
inkling of the tremendous call he put upon himself, body and will; she
could hear his heavy, labored breathing, but she, too, was breathing
in gasps. She could see neither the whiteness of his face nor yet the
blood soaking his shirt. He did not speak. He was not thinking clearly.
He merely said within himself: "I got her!" That was everything. Until,
as they came again into the outward-pouring firelight in front of the
cabin door, he wondered somewhat uneasily: "What am I going to do with
her?"
Lynette, panting and piteously shaken, dropped down on the edge of the
bunk, overborne by disaster, hopeless, her face in her hands; she was
fighting with herself against a burst of tears. Thus she did not see
Bruce Standing as he stood at the threshold, looking at her. She heard
his step; it shuffled and was uncertain, but she did not at the moment
mark this. She heard a whine from old Thor, a Thor perplexed and ill at
ease.
... Suddenly she thought: "He hasn't moved; he hasn't spoken!" She
dropped her hands then and looked up swiftly. And, thus, she surprised
a queer look in his eyes; his own thoughts were all chaotic and yet
there was beginning to burn one steady thought among them like one
bright flame in a whirl of smoke. He had closed the door when they
came in; he had sat down upon the up-ended log which served here as a
chair; Thor's head was on the master's knee and absently Standing's
hand was stroking it. He had dropped his rifle outside when he started
to run after her; he had not stopped to look for it as they came in.
She saw that a revolver was half in and half out of his pocket.... Then
she marked, with a start, the dead-white of his face and the way his
left arm hung limp, and the red stain on his wrist and the back of his
hand where the blood had run down his sleeve. Her first thought was
of his old wound and how he was not the man to give a wound a chance
to heal, but rather would break it open again and again through his
violence. Then she recalled what, during these last few minutes she had
forgotten--the shots which she had heard a little while ago. And she
knew that, though he sat upright and stared at her with the old look
again in his eyes, he had been shot the second time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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