IN THE hour preceding dawn, Roy gave over his fight against an unaccustomed nervousness that had kept him awake, rose, took a sponge bath, shaved, and dressed himself for the day. He stole from the room, and quietly let himself out of the house, in confident expectation that the outdoors charm of dawn would soothe the unrest of his spirit. A slight noise arrested his attention as he went toward the north end of the cottage. He was wearing tennis shoes, of which the rubber soles made no sound on the ground, and he went forward with caution, his curiosity aroused, for he was certain that he caught a sibilant whisper. Already, there was a rosy grayness stealing on the air, so that he could see, though dimly. As he came to the corner of the house, he halted, and peered covertly forward. He could distinguish a shadow that moved a little. As his eyes grew accustomed to the twilight, he made out that there were two forms there, one much the larger. Again, his ears detected a[231] faint whispering, too indistinct to be understood. Then, one softly spoken phrase came clearly: “Come away—they’ll hear us.” It was the voice of the engineer.
Roy’s muscles tensed for the leap forward. But he remembered the fact that as yet there was nothing in the way of direct evidence against Masters. He and his friends believed in the man’s guilt, but there was no proof. Now something might be said that would serve to convict the engineer of his crimes. Roy determined to listen, to learn what he might. The two who had met thus mysteriously moved toward the north-east, going swiftly toward the shore of the lake. At a safe distance behind them, Roy followed.
The couple halted in an open place on the lake shore, where a cliff dropped sheer to the water some thirty feet, as much more to the bottom of the lake. Roy contrived to make a slow progress to a point in the undergrowth above them, hardly a rod away, and here he was able to understand every word spoken between them. And now, fire of wrath, kindled by jealousy, burned fiercely in Roy’s bosom,[232] for there came to him the voice of the smaller of the two persons, and it was the voice of a girl—the voice of May Thurston. Strangely, the idea that she could be the one thus to meet the engineer by stealth had not occurred to him hitherto, and the shock of the discovery came near to robbing him of his self-control. Indeed he made a movement to dart forth, but again his action was checked by the command of reason, though through evil seconds he fought against obedience. Then abruptly, his mood changed as he caught the significance of the dialogue between the speakers:
“I knew it was you,” May was saying, in a voice vibrant with horror, which she strove to repress. “I knew it was you that first time, for I went up there, and found the rifle in the tree where you had been when I met you in the morning. I supposed, of course, that you understood how I knew, and so you wouldn’t dare to try again. And I thought you had gone. Thank God, I couldn’t sleep tonight, and came out in time to see you light that fuse—in time to put it out before you could stop me. I shall tell them everything in the morning, the first thing.”
[233]There was a note of finality in her voice. It was evident that whatever tenderness she had felt for this man had been overwhelmed beneath the flood of her loathing for his crimes. Masters must have understood perfectly the uselessness of all effort to persuade her from her purpose, for he wasted not an instant in argument; instead, he acted.
Before Roy could make a movement to interfere, the engineer had leaped forward. His long, powerful fingers closed in a strangling grasp on the soft, white throat of the girl, sank viciously into the tender flesh. May’s eyes protruded, her arms straightened out in a spasm of physical anguish, but no sound issued from the parted lips. Almost in the same second, Masters shifted his grip with lightning speed to her waist, lifted her easily, and swung her from the cliff out into space. Then, he went crashing off into the wood, running blindly, ere yet came the splash made by the girl’s falling body as it entered the water.
Perhaps Masters did not hear the second splash, which followed after the briefest interval. If he heard, and thought of it at all, he probably deemed it caused by some rock his[234] movement had set rolling over the cliff. Assuredly, he never dreamed that there had been at hand a man to plunge after his victim, to save her from the death to which he had assigned her. In his intimacy with May, he had learned that she could not swim. In that deep water, where the naked cliff rising vertically offered no hand-hold, she, in her da............