The javelin flew out, swift as a light ray, and she, not having turned as he had, would not see it in time. He caught at her, flung her aside so violently she crumpled to the steep-pitched ground. And he was left there in her place. It seemed to sunder his chest in two, and when he looked down with a sort of calm surprise, it was to find two feet of it protruding forward beyond his swaying body.
He went over and down with a sort of barrel-like roll, first upon his knees, then forehead pasted flat to ground, with a little spurt of dust flowering about his head. The shaft cracked and broke beneath his arched body. He curled over on his side, then flattened and lay still. There was pain, like current streaking through electric wiring, packed in his chest, then none, only tiredness and no regret at being prone.
His eardrums seemed to close up. As through a thick filter he could hear her screaming down to the two men on horses below them. “Shoot! Don’t you see him standing there? Mátalo!”
He lifted his head a little and watched, with a sort of detached interest, as though none of this really concerned him any more.
They only needed one bullet. It was an easy shot; a dead certainty. He was in full view above them.
The rifle report, in that rock-rimmed area, had a strangely flat, crunching sound, like the collapsing of an inflated paper bag.
Stones and earth globules spilled downward, with an oddly looped, liquid effect, like successive tiers of a falling necklace. Then his body came down, coasting on its face, almost to where they were, with that blue shadow patch still skipping after it, like the air-borne tail to a ground-dragged kite.
The little tuft of scarlet feathers seemed to sprout straight up from the soil now, like some solitary mountain flower. For sap, it oozed a sluggish little thread of blackened red, which died out amidst the rocks.
She was kneeling there beside Jones, holding the broken-off forward part of the javelin in her two hands, dazedly, as though it were some sort of linear measure that she was trying to hold up to her grief and loss to see how immeasurable it was, when the horsemen finally reached them, dismounted, and crouched down over the two of them.
He looked up at them blurredly.
“You were just a minute too late,” he said, “but thanks anyway.”
He closed his eyes again, but whether in weariness or because of some sort of inward pang of realization, they couldn’t tell. They gave the two of them water from their canteens, one from each, and he drank with his eyes closed, with his throat rippling, and a little water coming out at the edge of his mouth, tinged red.
“Help me get them up on the horses, Ramon. We’ve got to get them down to the lowland right away. He needs medical attention, and she needs rest and food. They’ve probably been wandering around lost for weeks back there in the emptiness on the other side.”
“In the emptiness on the other side,” Jones murmured wryly, without opening his eyes.
The second charro had been cautiously examining the fragment of javelin that he had taken from Chris’s unresisting hands. He held it near his nose, then with slow precaution traced it across the heel of his hand, just under the thumb joint. Then he looked closely at his hand in the fading sunlight, for some gloss or telltale shiny track.
“We’ll never get him all the way down,” he said softly in Spanish to his companion. “It was poisoned.” He flung it down curtly.
Chris picked it up again and looked at it dazedly.
“Put us both on the same horse,” Jones said quietly, with his eyes still closed. “Let me hold her in my arms on the way down. We mustn’t be apart any more.”
Picking its way painfully, the little procession started out, the two charros on foot, one leading the carrier horse, the other supporting Jones on its saddle with his shoulder and encircling arm.
Riding slowly down the slope, holding her cradled in his arm, he spoke to her low, his mouth close to her ear.
“Don’t be frightened, Chris. You’ll have to finish this ride out alone. I’m going to leave you soon.”
She answered equally low, unheard by the world around them. “You aren’t leaving me. We’re going to be together. To the very end of the ride.”
She opened her hand, disengaged the javelin tip, which she had held imbedded into her own flesh and blood, and flung it off.
Their heads close together, they went slowly down the mountain, down into the deeps, as successive tides of evening and infinity washed upward and over them in ever darkening hue; first ultramarine, then indigo, then midnight purple, then starless black.
His name was Lawrence Kingsley Tones.
He was just like any man, like you, like me; and yet, that is what happened to him.