With my
right hand clubbing my revolver, I reached my left out cautiously, and
once again my fingers came in contact with the bare limb. The fear left
me at that moment. I was back at the spot where I had fired at an unseen
foe some fifteen minutes before, and the body near me was the victim of
my lucky bullet.
Carefully I felt the dead man. He wore a large feather cloak and a tall
headdress, and I concluded that he was one of the wriggling brutes whose
performance we had watched in the cave. In the dust, beside the body, my
fingers found his revolver, and the fact that he had been armed at the
moment his party came unexpectedly upon us was more proof, if proof were
needed, that Leith's tactics were anything but straightforward.
Securing the revolver, I started to crawl away, but a sudden inspiration
came to me. I stripped the parrot-feather mat and the headdress from
the corpse and donned them over my own clothing. In the darkness
recognition was made through the fingers, and as there were eight
enemies in the cavern and only one friend, I considered that the danger
I ran of receiving a bullet from Holman was more than counterbalanced by
the protection that the dancer's costume would give me if I ran against
the groping hands of Leith or his gang.
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