"I am waiting," he whispered; but something in the voice said more and told her of the torture of his doubt.
At last, very slowly, her face came up and her eyes met his. They were misty eyes, but smiling, and as he bent with a wild leaping of his pulses and took her in his arms, her lips, too, met his, responsive to his kisses.
Finally he rose, and now it was his own hands that trembled and his own senses that swam with the intoxication of a happiness which seemed to him miraculous.
"I suppose," laughed the girl, "I ought to be ashamed to surrender so quickly--but I'm not. I'm very proud."
For a moment after that they sat silent and across the moonlight came the band music and the softened laughter of the dancers. And it was at that moment that Newt Spooner, so close that they could almost have heard his breathing, was reaching into his pocket for his borrowed revolver. The pause was brief, for the girl, looking into her lover's eyes, became suddenly beset by a new thought--perhaps some subtle premonition--and in its wake came panic. She laid her hands on his shoulders and bent so close that he could feel the play of her breath on his forehead.
"But you are going back there," she exclaimed; "back to the mountains, and I'm afraid. Are you in any danger, because, if you are, you sha'n't go! I won't let you go. Why, only to-day, there in Winchester, think what happened!"
"I sha'n't be hurt," he assured her. "Your love will be my talisman."
"If my love has such power," she exclaimed, "you will go on living to the end of time."
"Let's have no thought of danger to-night," he said. "To-night belongs to love, dearest: to love and to us."
And that was the exact moment at which Black Pete Spooner closed his hand over the pistol, thrusting his thumb between hammer and pin, and his forefinger between trigger and guard.
So suddenly interrupted at the threshold of his attainment, a man from the lowlands would have betrayed himself with oath or exclamation, or at least have struggled noisily in the grip that thwarted him. Newt Spooner was a mountaineer. Ambuscading caution was to him as instinctive as to the fox or weasel. He felt his hand drawn down at his back so forcibly that, crouching with his weight on one knee and one foot, he could not rise--yet he remained utterly noiseless. He carefully turned his head, and at the distance of a few inches recognized, even in the darkness, the drooping mustache and square jaw of the Deacon. The Deacon was holding a finger of the disengaged hand to his lips in an imperative command for silence. Black Pete was always a diplomat. He regarded this moment as one of rather desperate crisis, calling for extreme finesse.