The little soldier rode over the hills to Lamar Station in the waning spring twilight, asked at the telegraph office for messages, stuffed Armitage’s mail into his pockets at the post-office, and turned home as the moonlight poured down the slopes and flooded the valleys.  The Virginia roads have been cursed by larger armies than any that ever marched in Flanders, but Oscar was not a swearing man.  He paused to rest his beast occasionally and to observe the landscape with the eye of a strategist.  Moonlight, he remembered, was a useful accessory of the assassin’s trade, and the faint sounds of the spring night were all promptly traced to their causes as they reached his alert ears.

At the gate of the hunting-park grounds he bent forward in the saddle to lift the chain that held it; urged his horse inside, bent down to refasten it, and as his fingers clutched the iron a man rose in the shadow of the little lodge and clasped him about the middle.  The iron chain swung free and rattled against the post, and the horse snorted with fright, then, at a word from Oscar, was still.  There was the barest second of waiting, in which the long arms tightened, and the great body of his assailant hung heavily about him; then he dug spurs into the horse’s flanks and the animal leaped forward with a snort of rage, jumped out of the path and tore away through the woods.

Oscar’s whole strength was taxed to hold his seat as the burly figure thumped against the horse’s flanks.  He had hoped to shake the man off, but the great arms still clasped him.  The situation could not last.  Oscar took advantage of the moonlight to choose a spot in which to terminate it.  He had his bearings now, and as they crossed an opening in the wood he suddenly loosened his grip on the horse and flung himself backward.  His assailant, no longer supported, rolled to the ground with Oscar on top of him, and the freed horse galloped away toward the stable.

A rough and tumble fight now followed.  Oscar’s lithe, vigorous body writhed in the grasp of his antagonist, now free, now clasped by giant arms.  They saw each other’s faces plainly in the clear moonlight, and at breathless pauses in the struggle their eyes maintained the state of war.  At one instant, when both men lay with arms interlocked, half-lying on their thighs, Oscar hissed in the giant’s ear: 

“You are a Servian:  it is an ugly race.”

And the Servian cursed him in a fierce growl.

“We expected you; you are a bad hand with the knife,” grunted Oscar, and feeling the bellows-like chest beside him expand, as though in preparation for a renewal of the fight, he suddenly wrenched himself free of the Servian’s grasp, leaped away a dozen paces to the shelter of a great pine, and turned, revolver in hand.

“Throw up your hands,” he yelled.

The Servian fired without pausing for aim, the shot ringing out sharply through the wood.  Then Oscar discharged his revolver three times in quick succession, and while the discharges were still keen on the air he drew quickly back to a clump of underbrush, and crept away a dozen yards to watch events.  The Servian, with his eyes fixed upon the tree behind which his adversary had sought shelter, grew anxious, and thrust his head forward warily.