Almost as he spoke Sholto became aware that a fierce rush of shaggy beasts was crossing the scanty grass towards him.  He saw a vision of red mouths, gleaming teeth, and hairy breasts, into the leaping chaos of which he plunged and replunged his sword till his arm ached.  Mostly the stricken died snapping and tearing at each other; but ever and anon one stronger than the rest would overleap the barrier of dead and dying wolves that grew up in front of the three men, and Sholto would feel the teeth click clean and hard upon the mail of his arm or thigh before he could stoop to despatch the brute with the dirk which he grasped in his left hand.

The rush upon Sholto’s side fortunately did not last long, but while it continued the battle was strange and silent and grim—­this notable fight of man and beast.  As the youth at last cleared his front of a hairy monster that had sprung at his throat, he found himself sufficiently free to look round the trunk of the blasted pine that he might see how it fared with his companions.

At first he could see nothing clearly, for the same strange and weird conditions continued to permeate the earth and air.

For a moment all would be dark and then flash on continuous flash would follow, the wild-fire running about the tree-tops and glinting up through the recesses of the woods as if the heavens themselves were instinct with diabolic light.

As he looked, Sholto saw his father, a gigantic figure standing black and militant against the brightest of it.  His hand grasped a huge wolf by the heels, and he swung the beast about his head as easily as he was wont to handle the forehammer at home.  With his living weapon Malise had swept a space about him clear, and the beasts seemed to have fallen back in terror before such a strange enemy.

But what of the Lord James?  Overleaping the pile of dead and dying wolves which his sword and dagger had made, and from which savage heads still bit and snarled up at him as he went, Sholto ran round to seek the young Lord of Avondale.  At the first flash after leaving the tree trunk he was nowhere to be seen, but a second revealed him lying on the ground, with four shaggy beasts bending over him and tearing fiercely at his gorget and breast-armour.  With a loud shout Sholto was among them.  He passed his sword through and through the largest, and in its fall the wounded monster turned and bit savagely at the fore leg of a companion.  The bone cracked as a rotten branch snaps underfoot, and in another moment the two animals were rolling over and over, locked together in the death grapple.

Once, twice, and thrice Sholto struck right and left.  The rest of the beasts, seemingly astonished by the sudden flank attack, turned and fled.  Then, pushing off a huge wounded brute which lay gasping out its life in red jets upon the breast of the fallen man, he dragged James Douglas back to the tree which had been their fortress and propped him up against the trunk.