Lockwood drew his pistol. He stood in thick shadow. Only some twenty
yards in front of him was there any faintest break in the darkness; but
at that point the blurred moonlight made a grayness across the trail,
just a tone less deep than the redwoods' shadows.
With his revolver cocked and trained upon this patch of grayness,
Lockwood waited, holding his breath.
The gallop came blundering on, sounding in the night's silence as loud
as the passage of an express train; and the echo of it, flung back from
the canon side, confused it and distorted it till, to Lockwood's morbid
alertness, it seemed fraught with all the madness of flight, all the
hurry of desperation.
Then the hoof-beats rose to a roar, and a shadow just darker than the
darkness heaved against the grayness that Lockwood held covered with his
pistol. Instantly he shouted aloud:
"Halt! Throw up your hands!"
His answer was a pistol shot.
He dug his heels to his horse, firing as the animal leaped forward. The
horses crashed together, rearing, plunging, and Lockwood, as he felt the
body of a man crush by him on the trail, clutched into the clothes of
him, and, with the pistol pressed against the very flesh, fired again,
crying out as he did so:
"Drop your gun, Reno! I know you. I'll kill you if you move again!"
And then it was that a wail rose into the night, a wail of agony and
mortal apprehension:
"Signor Lockwude, Signor Lockwude, for the love of God, don't shoot!
'Tis I--Chino Zavalla.
Pages:
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45