Involuntarily she recoiled,
toppling upon the very brink of the pit, whereupon a heavy hand
reached forth and seized her. She found herself staring upward
into a face she had grown to know in her nightmares, a face the
mere memory of which was enough to freeze her blood. It was a
hideous visage, thick-lipped, fiat-featured, black; it was
disfigured by a scar from lip to temple and out of it gleamed a
pair of eyes distended and ringed with white, like the eyes of a
man insane.
For an instant Rosa made no sound and no effort to escape. The
apparition robbed her of breath, it paralyzed her in both mind and
body. Her first thought was that she had gone stark mad, but she
had felt Cobo's hands upon her once before and after her first
frozen moment of amazement she realized that she was in her
fullest senses. A shriek sprang to her lips, she tried to fight
the man off, but her weak struggle was like the fluttering of a
bird. Cobo crushed her down, strangling the half-uttered cry.
Terror may be so intense, so appalling as to be unendurable. In
Rosa's case a merciful oblivion overtook her. She felt the world
grow black, fall away; felt herself swing dizzily through space.
O'Reilly looked upward, inquiring, sharply, "What's the matter?"
He heard a scuffling of feet above him, but received no answer.
"Rosa! What frightened you? ROSA?" There was a moment of sickening
suspense, then he put his shoulder to the timbers he had displaced
and, with a violent shove, succeeded in swinging them back into
place.
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