Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/157

Rh had been grappling with him staggered back on all sides with terror-stricken faces. In a second, however, they gathered round him again, and lifting him up, tried to stay the blood. It was too late; he was dying; a few inarticulate gasps, a dim look of consciousness and fear in the blood-shot eyes, and he was gone.

Loud and confused talk filled the room men crowded in from the outside; pale and agitated, in the doorway, stood Jim, his eyes fixed on the dead man's face. "Will," he whispered, as I pressed closer to him, "I feel just like a murderer. Do you know that just before that pistol went off, I was saying to myself that I wished the man were dead, and I believed it would be a good deed to shoot him! Oh God, it is awful!" and Jim shuddered almost hysterically. In the excitement, everybody, even Jim, forgot the little girl. Presently, I felt my coat pulled by a timid touch. I turned. There, to my horror, stood the child. Her brown eyes were lifted with their ineffable appeal, not to my face, but to Jim, who stood just beyond me, and many inches taller; she had touched me only as the sole means of reaching him.

"Kind gentleman," she began. Before I could speak, Jim leaped past me, caught her in his arms, folded her on his breast as if she had been a baby, and carried her back into the parlor. She was beginning to cry with vague terror. Jim was too overwrought himself to soothe her.