’Twas then we had to drag my dear lad down and hold him fast, else he had flung himself into the torrent in some mad endeavor to spend his life for her.  So I know not in what false phrase the baronet refused her, but when I looked again she was no longer pleading as his suppliant; she was standing before him in the martyr steadfastness of a true, clean-hearted woman at bay.

“Then you will not by so much undo the wrong you have done me, Captain Falconnet?” she said.

“A wrong?  How then; do you call it a wrong to rescue you from these brutal savages, Mistress Margery?”

She took a step nearer, and though the dry-stick blaze was dying down and I could no longer see her face distinctly, I knew well how the scornful eyes were whipping him.

“Listen!” she said.  “When you set Tallachama and his braves upon us in the road that night, you were not cautious enough, Captain Falconnet.  I saw and heard you.  More than that, Tallachama and the others have spoken freely of your plans in their own tongue, not knowing that my poor Jeanne had been three years a captive among the Telliquos.”

The attack was so sudden-sharp and so completely a surprise that he was taken off his guard, else I made sure he would not at such a time have dropped the gentlemanly mask to stand forth the confessed ravisher.

“So ho?  Then you have been playing fast and loose with me as you did with the handsome young planter and that beggarly captain of Austrians?  ’Twas a bold game, ma petite, but you have lost and I have won, for my game was still bolder than yours.  What I need, I take, Mistress Madge, be it the body of a woman or the life of a man. Savez-vous un homme desespere, ma cherie? I am that man.  You pique me, and I need the dowry you will bring.  If I could have killed your lover out of hand, I might have been content to leave you for a time.  Since I could not, you go where I go; and when we return I shall do you the honor to make you Lady Falconnet!”

The effect of this fierce tirade, poured out in a torrent of hot words, was less marked upon his helpless captive than it was upon her four would-be defenders.  It moved us variously, each after his kind; nevertheless, I think the same thought lighted instantly upon each of us.  Though we might not reach and rescue her, her sharpest peril would be blunted upon the quieting of this fiend-in-chief.

So Ephraim Yeates stretched himself face downward in the damp grass and brought his long rifle to bear, while the Indian sprang up and poised his hatchet for the throw; but neither lead nor steel was loosed because the light was poor, and a hair’s-breadth swerving of the aim might spare the man and slay the woman.  As for the two of us who must needs come within stabbing distance, the same thought set us both to stripping coats and foot-clogs for a plunge into the barrier torrent.  But when we would have broken cover, the old borderer dropped his weapon and gripped us with a hand for each.