Then he turned
abruptly away and resumed his journey.
XXX
For ten seconds Oldham sat as Bob had left him. His hat and eyeglasses
were gone, his usually immaculate irongray hair rumpled, his clothes
covered with dust. A thin stream of blood crept from beneath his
close-clipped moustache. But the most striking result of the encounter,
to one who had known the man, was in the convulsed expression of his
countenance. A close friend would hardly have recognized him. His lips
snarled, his eyes flared, the muscles of his face worked. Ordinarily
repressed and inscrutable, this crisis had thrown him so far off his
balance that, as often happens, he had fallen to the other extreme.
Sniffling and half-sobbing, like a punished schoolboy, he dragged
himself to where his revolver lay forgotten in the dust. Taking as
deliberate aim as his condition permitted, he pulled at the trigger. The
hammer refused to rise, or the cylinder to revolve. Abandoning the
self-cocking feature of the arm, he tried to cock it by hand. The
mechanism grated sullenly against the grit from the road. Oldham worked
frantically to get the hammer to catch.
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