At the same
moment an arm was thrust round her throat, and she was
thrown roughly on the snow.
CHAPTER XV
CHECKMATED
For a minute or two Dorothy struggled to free herself
from her burly captor, but it was the struggle of the
gazelle with the tiger, and the tiger prevailed. He
laughed brutally, and put his knee upon her chest.
Even then she managed to slide her hand down to her side,
where, after the manner of most people in that land, she
carried a sheath-knife. This she succeeded in drawing,
but the half-breed saw the gleam of the steel and caught
her wrist with his vice-like fingers.
"Ho, Leon!" he yelled; "coom quick, and bring ze rope!"
It was a wonderful change that had come over the cross-eyed
one. A few minutes before and he had been an abject
coward; now he was the blustering bully and villain, with
his worst passions roused, and ready to take any risks
to gratify his thirst for revenge.
As for Dorothy, she saw the futility of struggling, and
lay still. What could have happened to her father and
Jacques that they did not come up? Surely they must be
near at hand. Was God going to allow these men, whose
lives she and her father had spared, to prevail? She did
not doubt that they meant to put her cruelly to death.
She breathed a prayer for Divine aid, and had a strange
presentiment that she was to be helped in some mysterious
way.
In a minute or two Leon was also upon the roof.
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