It took the mucker's
breath away to witness it, and it made the speech he had
contemplated more difficult than ever--nay, almost impossible.
He coughed nervously, and the old dark, lowering scowl
returned to his brow.
"Did you speak?" asked Miss Harding, icily.
Billy Byrne cleared his throat, and then there blurted from
his lips not the speech that he had intended, but a sudden,
hateful rush of words which seemed to emanate from another
personality, from one whom Billy Byrne once had been.
"Ain't dat boob croaked yet?" he growled.
The shock of that brutal question brought Barbara Harding
to her feet. In horror she looked down at the man who had
spoken thus of a brave and noble comrade in the face of
death itself. Her eyes blazed angrily as hot, bitter words
rushed to her lips, and then of a sudden she thought of
Byrne's self-sacrificing heroism in returning to Theriere's side
in the face of the advancing samurai--of the cool courage he
had displayed as he carried the unconscious man back to the
jungle--of the devotion, almost superhuman, that had sustained
him as he struggled, uncomplaining, up the steep
mountain path with the burden of the Frenchman's body the
while his own lifeblood left a crimson trail behind him.
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