They overpowered me before I could repeat the blow; they flung me down, kicking and pounding me as I lay there, but the death-stroke I awaited was withheld; the castete of the Seneca was jerked from his fist.

Then they seized Sir George and forced him into his saddle, calling on four troopers to pilot him within sight of the manor and shoot him if he attempted to return.

“You tell them that if they refuse to exchange Walter Butler for Ormond, we’ve torments for Colonel Ormond that won’t kill him under a week!” roared Billy Bones.

McCraw, stupefied with amazement and rage, stood mopping the blood from his blotched face, staring at me out of his crazy blue eyes.  For a moment his hand fiddled with his hatchet, then Bones shoved him away, and he strode off towards his horsemen, who were forming in column of fours.

“You tell ’em,” shouted Bones, “that before we finish him they’ll hear his screams in Albany!  If they want Colonel Ormond,” he added, his voice rising to a yell, “tell ’em to send a single man into the sugar-bush.  But if they hang Walter Butler, or if you try to catch us with your cavalry, we’ll take Ormond where we’ll have leisure to see what our Senecas can do with him!  Now ride! you damned—­”

He struck Sir George’s horse with the flat of his hanger; the horse bounded off, followed by four of McCraw’s riders, pistols cocked and hatchets loosened.

Bruised, dazed, exhausted, I lay there, listening to the receding thudding of their horses’ feet on the moss.

The crisis was over, and I had won—­not as I might have chosen to win, but by a compromise with death for deliverance from temptation.

If it was the compromise of a crazed creature, insane from mental and physical exhaustion, it was not the compromise of a weak man; I did not desire death as long as she lived.  I dreaded to leave her alone in the world.  But, though she loved him not—­and did love me—­I could not accept the future through his sacrifice and live to remember that he had laid down his life for a friend who desired from him more than he had renounced.

I was perfectly sane now; a strange calmness came over me; my mind was clear and composed; my meditations serene.  Free at last from hope, from sorrowful passion, from troubled desire, I lay there thinking, watching the long, red sun-rays slanting through the woods.

Gratitude to God for a life ended ere I fell from His grace, ere temptation entangled me beyond deliverance; humble pride in the honorable traditions that I had received and followed untainted; deep, reverent thankfulness for the strength vouchsafed me in this supreme crisis of my life—­the strength of a madman, perhaps, but still strength to be true, the power to renounce—­these were the meditations that brought me rest and a quietude I had never known when death seemed a long way off and life on earth eternal.

The setting sun crimsoned the pines; the riders were gathered along the hill-side, bending far out in their saddles to scan the valley below.  McCraw, his white face bound with a bloody rag, drew his straight claymore and wound the tattered tartan around his wrist, motioning Billy Bones to ride on.