“A stag! a stag!” cried Kenric as he promptly took an arrow and fixed it to his bowstring.

Allan followed his example.  Kenric knelt down on one knee and levelled his arrow.  Allan made ready to shoot over Kenric’s shoulder.  A noble stag, with wide-spreading antlers of twelve points, seemed almost to be flying towards them along the narrow path.  An arrow was half buried in his bleeding flank; a pair of shaggy deer hounds were behind in mad pursuit.

“Now!” cried Kenric.

The bowstrings twanged, and the two arrows speeding in their deadly flight plunged side by side into the stag’s broad chest.  The noble animal stumbled, regained his footing, and ran on.  Nearer and nearer he came, panting, moaning, glaring with wild and frightened eyes.  To his right was a steep wall of rock, to his left a fall of thirty feet into the surging waters below the cataract.  At his heels were the dogs, in front of him the two youths ready with another charge of arrows.  There was no way of escape.

“Lie down, my lord! —­ quick, lie down!” cried Allan, firing his dart.

The arrow rattled upon the stag’s antlers.  The stag bounded forward with one of the hounds upon his back, then stumbled upon his knees.  Kenric rose and ran to dirk him ere he should have time to regain his feet.

“Comeback, come back!” shouted Allan.

But Kenric, little heeding the danger, or not hearing the cry of warning amid the roaring of the water, was about to draw his dirk, when the stag fell over with the weight of the second hound.  One of his antler points caught in the string of Kenric’s bow.

Then Allan Redmain saw a sight that filled him with dismay.  Kenric, still holding his bow that was entangled in the stag’s horns, lost his footing; the stag rolled over; and Kenric fell, with his legs astride of the animal’s belly.  Then all four —­ Kenric, the stag, and the two dogs —­ struggling each with his own purpose, slipped swiftly down the sloping precipice, and plunged into the deep and surging linn below the foaming waterfall.

Allan Redmain, alone now upon that narrow path, uttered a loud cry as he saw his young master disappear through the mist of spray that rose from below the cataract.  Well did he know that even if Earl Kenric had not been killed, he yet was unable to swim.

Thoughts more dreadful than he had ever known coursed through Allan’s mind at that moment.  Kenric the young king, the only hope of Bute, killed? and he, Allan Redmain, had not saved him!

He looked around for help.  In that desolate place what help could he expect?  But he tarried not long to think of how he should act.  At the risk of his own life he was bound to do what he could.  Grasping his longbow in his two hands and using it as a skid, and digging his heels firmly into the stony ground of the sloping precipice, he went down foot by foot, now swaying this way and now that as the loose stones slipped before his feet.  Down, down he went until he came at last to the level top of a steep rock that stood over the brink of the deep linn.