Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/156

146 said, in reply to my reiterated entreaties to him to come to the dining-room. "If she wakes up and finds herself alone, she will be frightened. And you can see, by her face, that she has cried herself almost sick already."

It was true. There were deep circles, swollen and dark, around the eyes, and a drawn look about the mouth, pitiful to see on such a little face. She could not have been more than eleven years old, but the grief was written in lines such as might have been written on the face of a woman.

On my way to the dining-room I passed through the office, and looked at the drunken man, still in his heavy sleep, lying where we had laid him on the floor, like the brute he was. It was indeed a bad face—bad originally, and made more hideous still by the unmistakable record of a long life of vile passions. I shuddered to think of that child's pleading hazel eyes lifted up in terror to this evil countenance, and I no longer wondered at Jim's sudden and chivalrous desire to rescue the little one by almost any means. But her rescue was already planned and nearer at hand than we could have dreamed. Only a few moments after I had taken my seat at the supper-table, I heard excited voices in the office, the quick trampling of feet, and then a pistol-shot. I sprang up, and reached the door just in time to see the drunken man's body fall heavily on the floor, while the blood spouted from a bullet-hole in his throat, and the men who