Page:Peak and Prairie (1894).pdf/231

 "Are you ready?" the Kentuckian asked, and the sense of being "ready" thrilled him through every nerve.

At the given signal, Dirke raised his pistol in deliberate, deadly aim. De Lys saw it, and a subtle change swept his face, while he instantly readjusted his own aim. In Dirke's countenance there was no change, no slightest trace of any emotion whatever. Yet both seconds perceived, in the flash of time allowed, that the combat was to be a mortal one, and that it was Dirke who had thus decreed it.

And then it was, in that crucial moment, that Dirke's groping soul came out into the light,—even as the wide white flower over yonder had come out into the light, springing from its grim, unsightly stem. In that flashing instant of time his true nature, which he had so long sought to belie, took final command. All that was false, fantastic, artificial, loosed its hold and fell away. For the first time in two years Dabney Dirke was perfectly sane.

At the word to fire, he did the one thing possible to the man he was; his pistol flashed straight upwards.

The two shots rang out simultaneously, setting the echoes roaring among the hills. Dirke staggered, but recovered his foothold