I do not know, nor care: but I
know that, as I drew the cangiar, the basest and the slyest of all the
devils was whispering me, tongue in cheek: 'Kill, kill--and be merry.'
With excruciating slowness, like a crawling glacier, tender as a nerve
of the touching leaves, I moved, I stole, obliquely toward her through
the wall of bush, the knife behind my back. Once only there was a
restraint, a check: I felt myself held back: I had to stop: for one of
the ends of my divided beard had caught in a limb of prickly-pear.
I set to disentangling it: and it was, I believe, at the moment of
succeeding that I first noticed the state of the sky, a strip of which I
could see across the rivulet: a minute or so before it had been pretty
clear, but now was busy with hurrying clouds. It was a sinister
muttering of thunder which had made me glance upward.
When my eyes returned to the sitting figure, she was looking foolishly
about the sky with an expression which almost proved that she had never
before heard that sound of thunder, or at least had no idea what it
could bode.
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