With a quick backward step, Sholto slashed his last assailant across the upper arm, effectually disabling him.  Then, catching his heel in a rut, he fell backward, and it would have gone ill with him but for the action of his father.  The brawny one was profoundly disgusted at having to waste his strength and science upon such a rabble, and now, at the moment of his son’s fall, he suddenly dropped his sword and seized a couple of torches which had fallen upon the pavement.  With these primitive weapons he fell like a whirlwind upon the foe, taking them unexpectedly in flank.  A sweep of his mighty arms right and left sent two of the assailants down, one with the whole side of his face scarified from brow to jaw, and the other with his mouth at once widened by the blow and hermetically closed by the blazing tar.

Next, Sholto’s pair of assailants received each a mighty buffet and went down with cracked sconces.  The rest, seeing this revolving and decimating fire-mill rushing upon them as Malise waved the torches round his head, turned tail and fled incontinently into the narrow alleys which radiated in all directions from the Hotel de Pornic.

CHAPTER XLIV

LAURENCE TAKES NEW SERVICE

“Look to them well, Malise,” said the Lord James; “’twas you who did the skull-cracking at any rate.  See if your leechcraft can tell us if any of these young rogues are likely to die.  I would not have their deaths on my conscience if I can avoid it.”

First picking up and sheathing his sword, then bidding Sholto hold a torch, Malise turned the youths over on their backs.  Four of them grunted and complained of the flare of the light in their eyes, like men imperfectly roused from sleep.

“Thae loons will be round in half an hour,” said Malise, confidently.  “But they will hae richt sair heads the morn, I’se warrant, and some o’ them may be marked aboot the chafts for a Sabbath or twa!”

But the swarthy youth whom the others called De Sille, he who had been spokesman and who had fallen first, was more seriously injured.  He had worn a thin steel cap on his head, which had been cracked by the buffet he had received from the mighty fist of the master armourer.  The broken pieces had made a wound in the skull, from which blood flowed freely.  And in the uncertain light of the torch Malise could not make any prolonged examination.

“Let us tak’ the callant up to the tap o’ the hoose,” he said at last; “we can put him in the far ben garret till we see if he is gaun to turn up his braw silver-taed shoon.”

Without waiting for any permission or dissent, the smith of Carlinwark tucked his late opponent under his arm as easily as an ordinary man might carry a puppy.  Then, sheathing their swords, the other three Scots made haste to leave the place, for the gleaming of lanthorns could already be seen down the street, which might either mark the advent of the city watch or the return of the enemy with reinforcements.