To see the wild color painting
her face like a flower filled his veins with fire. The beauty of her, the
touch of her, the mad beat of her heart against him made him like a
drunken man in his triumph. Love? Yes, the love of the brute! He
prolonged his stay. He had no idea of taking her with him. When the time
came, he would go. Day after day, week after week he put it off, feigning
that the bone of his leg was affected, and Andre Beauvais treated him
like a brother. He told us all this as he lay there in his cabin in that
sulphur hell. I am a man of God, and I do not lie.
Is there need to tell you that Andre discovered them? Yes, he found
them--and with that wonderful hair of hers so closely about them that he
was still bound in the tresses when the discovery came.
Andre had come in exhausted, and unexpectedly. There was a terrible
fight, and in spite of his exhaustion he would have killed Joseph Brecht
if at the last moment the latter had not drawn his revolver. After all is
said and done, gentlemen, can a woman love but once? Joseph Brecht fired.
In that infinitesimal moment between the leveling of the gun and the
firing of the shot Marie Beauvais found answer to that question. Who was
it she loved? She sprang to her husband's breast, sheltering him with the
body that had been disloyal to its soul, and she died there--with a
bullet through her heart.
Joseph Brecht told us how, in the horror of his work--and possessed now
by a terrible fear--he ran from the cabin and fled for his life.
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