In Secret

"So you tricked us, eh?" he sneered. "You didn't get your rat-poison at the spring after all. The Yankees are foxes after all!" He laughed his loud, nasal, nickering laugh--"Foxes are foxes but men are men. Do you understand that, you damned vixen?"

"Will you let me kill myself?" she asked in a low but steady voice.

He seemed surprised, then realising why she had asked that mercy, showed all his teeth and smirked at her out of narrow-slitted eyes.

"Where is McKay?" he repeated.

She remained mute.

"Will you tell me where he is to be found?"

"No!"

"Will you tell me if I let you go?"

"No."

"Will you tell me if I give you back your trench-knife?"

The white agony in her face interested and amused him and he waited her reply with curiosity.

"No!" she whispered.

"Will you tell me where McKay is to be found if I promise to shoot you before--"

"No!" she burst out with a strangling sob.

He lighted another cigarette and, for a while, considered her musingly as he sat smoking. After a while he said: "You are rather dirty--all over blood. But you ought to be pretty after you're washed." Then he laughed.

The girl swayed where she stood, fighting to retain consciousness.

"How did you discover the Via Mala?" he inquired with blunt curiosity.

"You showed it to me!"

"You slut!" he said between his teeth. Then, still brutishly curious: "How did you know that spring had been poisoned? By those dead birds and animals, I suppose.... And that's what I told everybody, too. The wild things are bound to come and drink. But you and your running-mate are foxes. You made us believe you had gone over the cliff. Yes, even I believed it. It was well done--a true Yankee trick. All the same, foxes are only foxes after all. And here you are."

He got up; she shrank back, and he began to laugh at her.

"Foxes are only foxes, my pretty, dirty one!--but men are men, and a Prussian is a super-man. You had forgotten that, hadn't you, little Yankee?"

He came nearer. She sprang aside and past him and ran for the river; but he caught her at the edge of a black pool that whirled and flung sticky chunks of foam over the bowlders. For a while they fought there in silence, then he said, breathing heavily, "A fox can't drown. Didn't you know that, little fool?"

Her strength was ebbing. He forced her back to the glade and stood there holding her, his inflamed face a sneering, leering mask for the hot hell that her nearness and resistance had awakened in him. Suddenly, still holding her, he jerked his head aside and stared behind him. Then he pushed her violently from him, clutched at his holster, and started to run. And a pistol cracked and he pitched forward across the log upon which he had sat, and lay so, dripping dark blood, and fouling the wild-flowers with the flow.