He could fire before Clanton could lift the pistol he held. But behind the American Arline laughed suddenly, unexpectedly.
"It worked, Bill!" she exclaimed. "Our man will get the ruby while we hold Woon Yuen here! The fool! He hasn't yet guessed that we tricked him to draw him away from his shop after I'd found where he hid the gem."
Woon Yuen's face went ashen. With a choking cry he fired, not at Clanton but at the girl. But his hand was shaking like a leaf. He missed, and like an echo of his shot came the crack of Clanton's pistol. Woon Yuen dropped, drilled through the head.
"Good work, kid!" Clanton cried exultantly. "He fell for it—hard!"
"But they'll hang us for this!" whimpered the girl. "Listen! Someone's running up the hall! They've heard the shots!"
Stooping swiftly Clanton folded Duke Tremayne's fingers about the butt of the smoking pistol, and then kicked the man heavily in the shins. Tremayne grunted and showed signs of returning consciousness. Clanton drew Arline into the other room and they watched through the crack of the door.
The hall door opened and Yao Chin came in like a panther, hatchet in hand. His eyes blazed at the sight of Woon Yuen on the floor, Tremayne staggering to his feet, a pistol in his hand. With one stride the hatchetman reached the reeling blackmailer. There was a flash of steel, an ugly butcher-shop crunch, and Tremayne slumped, his skull split. Yao Chin tossed the reeking hatchet to the floor beside his victim and turned away.
"Out of here, quick!" muttered Clanton, shaking Arline who seemed threatened with hysteria. "Up the alley—in the other direction."
She regained her poise in their groping flight up the darkened alley, as Clanton muttered: "We're in the clear now. Tremayne can't talk, with his head split, and that hatchetman'll tell his pals Tremayne shot their boss."
"We'd better get out of town!" They had emerged into a narrow, lamp-lit street.
"Why? We're safe from suspicion now." A little tingle of pleasure ran through her as Clanton turned into a doorway and spoke to a grinning old Chinaman who bowed them into a small neat room, with curtained windows and a couch.
As the door closed behind the old Chinese, Clanton caught her hungrily to him, finding her red lips, now unresisting. Her arms went about his thick neck as he lifted her bodily from the floor. Willingly she yielded, responded to his eager caresses.
She had only exchanged masters, it was true, but this was different. There was a delicious sense of comfort and security in a strong man who could fight for her and protect her. There was pleasure in the dominance of his strong hands. With a blissful sigh she settled herself luxuriously in his powerful arms.
THE END
She Devil
Table of Contents
OUTSIDE, where dawn was just dispelling the fog-wisps from the South Pacific waters, the sea was calm, but a typhoon was raging in the cabin of the Saucy Wench. Most of the thunder was supplied by Captain Harrigan—vociferous oratory, charged with brimstone and sulphur, punctuated with resounding bangs of a hairy fist on the table across which he was bellowing damnation and destruction at Raquel O’Shane, who screamed back at him. Between them they were making so much noise they did not hear the sudden shouting that burst forth on deck.
“Shut up!” bawled the captain. He was broad as a door and his undershirt revealed a chest and arms muscled and hairy as an ape’s. A growth of whiskers bristled his jaws, and his eyes blazed. He was a spectacle to daunt any woman, even if she had not known him as Bully Harrigan, smuggler, blackbirder, pearl-thief and pirate, when opportunity offered itself.
“Shut up!” he repeated. “One more yap out of you, you Spanish-Irish gutter-snipe, and I’ll bend one on your jaw!”
Being a man of primal impulses, he demonstrated his meaning by a fervent swipe of a mallet-like fist, which Raquel dodged with the agility of much practice. She was slim and supple, with foamy black hair, dark eyes that blazed with deviltry, and an ivory-tinted skin, heritage of her mixed Celtic-Latin blood, that made men’s heads swim at first sight. Her figure agitated by her movements, was a poem of breath-taking grace.
“Pig!” she screamed. “Don’t you dare lay a finger on me!” This was purely rhetorical; Harrigan had laid a finger on her more than once during the past weeks, to say nothing of whole fists, belaying pins, and rope’s ends. But she was still untamed.
She too banged the table and cursed in three languages.
“You’ve treated me like a dog all the way from Brisbane!” she raged. “Getting tired of me, are you, after taking me away from a good job in San Francisco—”
“I took you—” The enormity of the accusation choked the captain. “Why, you Barbary Coast hussy, the first time I ever saw you was that night you climbed aboard as we were pullin’ out and begged me on your blasted knees to take you to sea and save you from the cops, account of your knifin’ a Wop in that Water Street honky-tonk where you were workin’, you—”
