"You gendarme," he cried in a menacing voice, "you think you shall follow in my track. Yes? I blow your d.a.m.n head off if you stir before the hour.... After that--well, follow and be d.a.m.n!"
Even as he spoke he stepped outside and slammed the door; and Darragh and Stormont leaped for it. Then the loud detonation of Quintana"s rifle was echoed by the splintering rip of bullets tearing through the closed door; and both men halted in the face of the leaden hail.
Eve ran to the pantry window and saw Quintana in somebody"s stolen lumber-sledge, lash a big pair of horses to a gallop and go floundering past into the Ghost Lake road.
As he sped by in a whirl of snow he fired five times at the house, then, rising and swinging his whip, he flogged the frantic horses into the woods.
In the dining room, Stormont, red with rage and shame, and having found his rifle in the corridor outside Eve"s bedroom, was trying to open the shutters for a shot; and Darragh, empty-handed, searched the house frantically for a weapon.
Eve, terribly excited, came from the pantry:
"He"s gone!" she cried furiously. "He"s in somebody"s lumber-sledge with a pair of horses and he"s driving west like the devil!"
Stormont ran to the tap-room telephone, cranked it, and warned the constabulary at Five Lakes.
"Good G.o.d!" he exclaimed, turning to Darragh, scarlet with mortification, "what a ghastly business! I never dreamed he was within miles of Clinch"s! It"s the most shameful thing that ever happened to me----"
"What could anybody do under that rifle?" said Eve hotly. "That beast would have murdered the first person who stirred!"
Darragh, exasperated and dreadfully humiliated, looked miserably at his brand-new wife.
Eve and Stormont also looked at her. She had come forward from the rear of the stairway where Quintana had brutally driven her. Now she stood with one hand on the empty leather jewel case, looking at everybody out of pretty, bewildered eyes.
To Darragh, in a perplexed, unsteady voice: "Is it the same bandit who robbed us before?"
"Yes; Quintana," he said wretchedly. Rage began to redden his features.
"Ricca," he said, "I promised I"d find your jewels.... I promise you again that I"ll never drop this business until your gems--and the Flaming Jewel--are in your possession----"
"But, Jim----"
"I swear it!" he exclaimed violently. "I"m not such a stupid fool as I seem----"
"Dear!" she protested excitedly, "you _have_ done what you promised. My gems _are_ in my possession--I believe----"
She caught up the emblazoned case, stripped out the first tray, then the second, and flung them aside. Then, searching with the delicate tip of her forefinger in the empty case, she suddenly pressed the bottom hard,--thumb, middle finger and little finger forming the three apexes of an equilateral triangle.
There came a clear, tiny sound like the ringing of the alarm in a repeating watch. Very gently the false bottom of the case detached itself and came away in the palm of her hand.
And there, each embedded in its own shaped compartment of chamois, lay the Esthonian jewels--the true ones--deep hidden, always doubly guarded by two sets of perfect imitations lining the two visible trays above.
And, in the centre, blazed the Erosite gem--the magnificent Flaming Jewel, a glory of living, blinding fire.
n.o.body stirred or spoke. Darragh blinked at the crystalline blaze as though stunned.
Then the young girl who had once been Her Serene Highness Theodorica, Grand d.u.c.h.ess of Esthonia, looked up at her brand-new husband and laughed.
"Did you really suppose it was these that brought me across the ocean?
Did you suppose it was a pa.s.sion for these that filled my heart? Did you think it was for these that I followed you?"
She laughed again, turned to Eve:
"_You_ understand. Tell him that if he had been in rags I would have followed him like a gypsy.... They say there is gypsy blood in us....
G.o.d knows.... I think perhaps there is a little of it in all real women----" Still laughing she placed her hand lightly upon her heart--"In all women--perhaps--a Flaming Jewel imbedded here----"
Her eyes, tender, and mocking, met his; she lifted the jewel-case, closed it, and placed it in his hands.
"Now," she said, "you have everything in your possession; and we are safe--we are quite safe, now, my jewels and I."
Then she went to Eve and rested both hands on her shoulders.
"Shall we put on our snow-shoes and go--home?"
Stormont flung open the bullet-splintered door. Outside in the snow he dropped on both knees to buckle on Eve"s snow-shoes.
Darragh was performing a like office for his wife, and the State Trooper, being un.o.bserved, took Eve"s slim hands and kissed them, looking up at her where he was kneeling.
Her pale face blushed as it had that day in the woods on Owl Marsh, so long, so long ago, when this man"s lips first touched her hands.
As their eyes met both remembered. Then she smiled at her lover with the shy girl"s soul of her gazing out at him through eyes as blue as the wild blind-gentians that grow among the ferns and mosses of Star Pond.
Far away in the northwestern forests Quintana still lashed his horses through the primeval pines.
Triumphant, reckless, resourceful, dangerous, he felt that now nothing could stop him, nothing bar his way to freedom.
Out of the wilderness lay his road and his destiny; out of it he must win his way, by strategy, by cunning, by violence--creep out, lie his way out, shoot his way out--it scarcely mattered. He was going out! He was going back to life once more. Who could forbid him? Who stop him?
Who deny him, now, when, in his pockets, he held all that was worth living for--the keys to power, to pleasure,--the key to everything on earth!
In fierce exultation he slapped the gla.s.s jewels in his pocket and laughed aloud.
"The keys to the world!" he cried. "Let him stop me and take them who is a better man than I!" Then his long whip whistled and he cursed his horses.
Then, of a sudden, close by in the snowy road ahead, he saw a State Trooper on snow-shoes,--saw the upflung arm warning him--screamed curses at his horses, flogged them forward to crush this thing to death that dared menace him--this object that suddenly rose up out of nowhere to s.n.a.t.c.h from him the keys of the world----
For a moment the State Trooper looked after the runaway horses. There was no use following; they"d have to run till they dropped.
Then he lowered the levelled rifle from his shoulder, looked grimly at the limp thing which had tumbled from the sledge into the snowy road and which sprawled there crimsoning the spotless flakes that fell upon it.
THE END
_Novels by_ ROBERT W. CHAMBERS