Page:Randall Parrish - The Red Mist.djvu/408

 388 However I haven't any reason to be jealous of you—Noreen knows you too well by this time; you proved yourself a treacherous cur in Lewisburg. Now turn around!"

There was no other weapon in his belt, and it never occurred to me that he might possess another secreted in his jacket; nor did I realize the desperate hatred of me which gave him reckless courage. What to do with the fellow obsessed my mind; I possessed nothing to securely bind him with; I could not leave him free, nor had I any desire to take him along with me. He settled the problem himself. Suddenly, his arms above his head, his eyes on mine, he kicked viciously, the heavy shoe striking my wrist, sending the revolver I held spinning into the grass a dozen feet away. With almost the same movement he was tugging at his jacket pocket. I saw the gleam of steel, and gripped his fingers just in time; my other hand, numbed by the blow dealt me, was, for the instant, useless, yet I struck him with my elbow full in the face. I had no grip that would hold, yet it tangled the revolver in the folds of cloth so he could not draw, and, with a snarl of baffled rage, he tore his fingers loose, and clutched at my throat with both hands. Back and forth we swayed on the very edge of the ravine, kept from plunging down into the black depths by the intervening fringe