He waved down his
muttering, rising men.
Venters backed out of the door and waited, hearing, as no sound
had ever before struck into his soul, the rapid, heavy steps of
the rustler.
Oldring appeared, and Venters had one glimpse of his great
breadth and bulk, his gold-buckled belt with hanging guns, his
high-top boots with gold spurs. In that moment Venters had a
strange, unintelligible curiosity to see Oldring alive. The
rustler's broad brow, his large black eyes, his sweeping beard,
as dark as the wing of a raven, his enormous width of shoulder
and depth of chest, his whole splendid presence so wonderfully
charged with vitality and force and strength, seemed to afford
Venters an unutterable fiendish joy because for that magnificent
manhood and life he meant cold and sudden death.
"Oldring, Bess is alive! But she's dead to you--dead to the life
you made her lead--dead as you will be in one second!"
Swift as lightning Venters's glance dropped from Oldring's
rolling eyes to his hands. One of them, the right, swept out,
then toward his gun--and Venters shot him through the heart.
Slowly Oldring sank to his knees, and the hand, dragging at the
gun, fell away. Venters's strangely acute faculties grasped the
meaning of that limp arm, of the swaying hulk, of the gasp and
heave, of the quivering beard. But was that awful spirit in the
black eyes only one of vitality?
"Man--why--didn't--you--wait? Bess--was--" Oldring's whisper died
under his beard, and with a heavy lurch he fell
forward.
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