That moment kept recurring to her--the beating on the door, the voices
in the hall, the shouts, and the arms of Andrew Lanning around her, and
his tense, desperate face close to hers. It became less dreamlike that
moment. She began to understand that if she lived to be a hundred, she
would never find that memory dimmer.
A half-sad, half-happy smile was touching the corners of her mouth, when
Charles Merchant knocked at her door. She gave herself one moment in
which to banish the queer pain of knowing that she would never see this
wild Andrew again, and then she told Charles to come in.
In fact, he was already opening the door. He was calm of face, but she
guessed an excitement beneath the surface.
"I've got something to show you," he said.
A great thought made her sit up in the chair; but she was afraid just
then to stand up. "I know. The posse has reached that silly boy and
brought him back. But I don't want to see him again. Handcuffed, and
all that."
"The posse is here, at least," said Charles noncommittally. She was
finding something new in him. The fact that he could think and hide his
thoughts from her was indeed very new; for, when she first met him, he
had seemed all surface, all clean young manhood without a stain.
"Do you want me to see the six brave men again?" she asked, smiling, but
really she was prying at his mind to get a clew of the truth. "Well,
I'll come down."
And she went down the stairs with Charles Merchant beside her; he kept
looking straight ahead, biting his lips, and this made her wonder. She
began to hum a gay little tune, and the first bar made the man start. So
she kept on. She was bubbling with apparent good nature when Charles,
all gravity, opened the door of the living room.
The shades were drawn. The quiet in that room was a deadly, living
thing. And then she saw, on the sofa at one side of the place, a human
form under a sheet.
"Charles!" whispered the girl. She put out her hand and touched his
shoulder, but she could not take her eyes off that ghastly dead thing.
"They--they--he's dead--Andrew Lanning! Why did you bring me here?"
"Take the cloth from his face," commanded Charles Merchant, and there
was something so hard in his voice that she obeyed.
The sheet came away under her touch, and she was looking into the sallow
face of Bill Dozier. She had remembered him because of the sad
mustaches, that morning, and his big voice.
"That's what your romantic boy out of a book has done," said Charles
Merchant. "Look at his work!"
But she dropped the sheet and whirled on him.
"And they left him--" she said.
"Anne," said he, "are you thinking about the safety of that
murderer--now? He's safe, but they'll get him later on; he's as good as
dead, if that's what you want to know."
"God help him!" said the girl.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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