aroused, and in spite of her brave struggle the table continued to move
and she to retreat before it.

"Oh!" she said, in a panic of fear and dread, her face flushed, her
eyes wide and bright, her breath coming in great panting sobs; "Oh! you
beast! You beast!"

He did not answer. His eyes were burning with a wanton fire, they
glowed with the fierce, fell purpose of animal desire; he breathed
shrilly, rapidly, gaspingly, though the strength that he had been
compelled to use to overmatch hers had not been great.

She did not succeed in retarding the advance of the table, but she did
succeed in directing its course a little, so that instead of backing
her against the wall, as he no doubt intended to do, she brought up
finally against the stove in the corner.

There was a fire in the stove--she had kept it going to keep Calumet's
supper warm--and when she felt her body against it she reached around
and secured a flat iron. The handle burned her hand, but she lifted it
and hurled it with all her force at his head. He dodged, laughing
derisively. She seized another and threw it, and this he dodged also.
She was reaching for the teakettle when he shoved the table aside and
lunged at her, and she dropped the kettle with a scream of horror and
slipped around the stove to the wall near the sitting-room door,
reaching the latter and trying frantically to unbar it.

She heard Bob's voice on the other side of the door; he was calling,
"Betty! Betty!" in shrill, scared accents, and when Taggart leaped at
her, seizing her by the shoulders as she worked with the fastenings of
the door, she screamed to Bob to get the rifle from Malcolm's room,
directing him to go out the front way, go around to the kitchen and
shoot Taggart through one of the windows.

How long she struggled with Taggart there by the door she did not know.
It might have been an hour or merely a minute. But she fought him,
clawing at his face with her hands, biting him, kicking him. And she
remembered that he was getting the better of her, that his breath was
in her face and that he was dragging her toward the lamp on the shelf,
evidently intending to extinguish it--that he had almost reached it,
was, indeed, reaching a hand out to grasp it, when there came a flash
from the window, the crash of breaking glass, and the roar of an
exploding firearm.

She also remembered thinking that Bob had taken a desperate chance in
shooting at Taggart when she was so