Two miles beyond Clinch's Dump, Hal Smith pulled Stormont's horse to a walk. He was tremendously excited.
With naive sincerity he believed that what he had done on the spur of the moment had been the only thing to do.
By snatching the Flaming Jewel from Quintana's very fingers he had diverted that vindictive bandit's fury from Eve, from Clinch, from Stormont, and had centred it upon himself.
More than that, he had sown the seeds of suspicion among Quintana's own people. they never could discover Salzar's body. Always they must believe that it was Nicolas Salzar and no other who so treacherously robbed them, and who rode away in a rain of bullets, shaking the emblazoned morocco case above his masked head in triumph, derision and defiance.
At the recollection of what had happened, Hal Smith drew bridle, and, sitting his saddle there in the false dawn, threw back his handsome head and laughed until the fading stars overhead swam in his eyes through tears of sheerest mirth.
For he was still young enough to have had the time of his life. Nothing in the Great War had so thrilled him. For, in what had just happened, there was humour. There had been none in the Great Grim Drama.
Still, Smith began to realise that he had taken the long, long chance of the opportunist who rolls the bones with Death. He had kept his pledge to the little Grand Duchess. It was a clean job. It was even good drama---The picturesque angle of the affair shook Hal Smith with renewed laughter. As a moving picture hero he thought himself the funniest thing on earth.
From the time he ha poked a pistol against Sard's fat paunch, to this bullet-pelted ride for life, life had become one ridiculously exciting episode after another.
He had come through like the hero in a best-seller. ... Lacking only a heroine. ... If there had been any heroine it was Eve Strayer. Drama had gone wrong in that detail. ... So perhaps, after all, it was real life he had been living and not drama. Drama, for the masses, must have a definite beginning and ending. Real life lacks the latter. In life nothing is finished. It is always a premature curtain which is yanked by that doddering old stage-hand, Johnny Death.
* * * * *
Smith sat in his saddle, thinking, beginning to be sobered now by the inevitable reaction which follows excitement and mirth as relentlessly as care dogs the horseman.
He had a fine time, -- save for the horror of the Rock-trail. ... He shuddered. ... Anyway, at worst he had not shirked a clean deal in that ghastly game. ... It was God's mercy that he was not lying where Salzar lay, ten feet -- twenty -- a hundred deep, perhaps -- in immemorial slime---He shook himself in his saddle as though to be rid of the creeping horror, and wiped his clammy face.