As Howat passed, a low, hostile murmur rose. He halted, and met
them with a dark, contemptuous countenance, and the murmur died in a
shuffling of feet in the dry grass. He turned again, and walked slowly
away, when a broken piece of rough casting hurtled by his head. In an
overpowering rage he whirled about, throwing his rifle to his shoulder.
A man detached from the group was lowering his arm; and, holding the
sights hard on the other's metal-buttoned, twill jacket, Howat pulled
the trigger. There was only an answering dull, ineffectual click.
The rifle slid to the ground, and Howat stared, fascinated, at the man
he had attempted to kill. The charcoal burners were stationary before
the momentary abandon of Howat Penny's temper. "Right at me," the man
articulated who had been so nearly shot into oblivion. "--saw the hammer
fall." A tremendous desire to escape possessed Howat; a violent chill
overtook him; his knees threatened the loss of all power to hold him up.
He stepped backward, his gun stock trailing over the inequalities of the
ground; then he swung about, and, in an unbroken silence, stumbled away.
He was not running from anything the charcoal burner might say, do, but
from a terrifying spectacle of himself; from the vision of a body shot
through the breast, huddled in the sere underbrush.
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