Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/286

 counted upon not two minutes past to endow him so richly. He paused in the door, Cattle Kate stretching her arm before him, fending him like an eagle her young. It seemed that he would not go and leave that house standing upon a single hope.

"Alma, you and Barrett have been nosin' around to find out something. You wanted to know what I had on Nearing, you thought you could get it out of Kate. It'll be a sweet pill for you to chew on till I come back. I'll tell you."

"Findlay!" Nearing shouted, his voice hoarse in the appeal of terror.

"There's your senator, there's your honorable man!" Findlay mocked, pointing over Kate's shoulder.

"Hurry! don't you hear them comin'?" Kate implored.

"Even if I don't happen to come back, I pass you my word that Nearing swings for the"

"Findlay!" Nearing shouted again, in terrible voice of warning and appeal.

In his vindictive eagerness to make a complete ruin of the man in whose misery he could profit no longer, Findlay came a little from behind Kate's sheltering body to lean and look into the room. Nearing, standing close to Manuel, snatched a pistol from the old man's belt and fired.

Cattle Kate seemed to rise a little from the floor with the flash of Nearing's shot, and reel backward, as if struck a mighty blow. Findlay threw out his arm to stay her fall, and the girl, her face set hard in the grimace of her death-pang, lifted her drooping arm