I turned to skirt the group.  A pistol-shot rang through the wood.  A sword flashed to light.  Before I had time to think, but not—­thanks to M. Picot’s lessons long ago—­not before I had my own rapier out, an assassin blade would have taken me unawares.

I was on guard.  Steel struck fire in red spots as it clashed against steel.  One thrust, I know, touched home; for the pistol went whirling out of my adversary’s hand, and his sword came through the dark with the hiss of a serpent.  Again I seemed to be in Boston Town; but the hunting room had become a northland forest, M. Picot, a bearded man with his back to the fire and his face in the dark, and our slim foils, naked swords that pressed and parried and thrust in many a foul such as the French doctor had taught me was a trick of the infamous Blood!  Indeed, I could have sworn that a woman’s voice cried out through the dark; but the rain was in my face and a sword striking red against my own.  Thanks, yes, thanks a thousand times to M. Picot’s lessons; for again and yet again I foiled that lunge of the unscrupulous swordsman till I heard my adversary swearing, between clinched teeth.  He retreated.  I followed.  By a dexterous spring he put himself under cover of the woods, leaving me in the open.  My only practice in swordsmanship had been with M. Picot, and it was not till long years after that I minded how those lessons seemed to forestall and counter the moves of that ambushed assassin.  But the baffling thing was that my enemy’s moves countered mine in the very same way.

He had not seen my face, for my back was turned when he came up, and my face in the shade when I whirled.  But I stood between the dark and the fire.  Every motion of mine he could forecast, while I could but parry and retreat, striving in vain to lure him out, to get into the dark, to strike what I could not see, pushed back and back till I felt the rush that aims not to disarm but to slay.

Our weapons rang with a glint of green lightnings.  A piece of steel flew up.  My rapier had snapped short at the hilt.  A cold point was at my throat pressing me down and back as the foil had caught me that night in M. Picot’s house.  To right, to left, I swerved, the last blind rushes of the fugitive man. . . .

“Storm and cold—­man and beast—­powers of darkness and devil—­he must fight them all——­”

The memory of those words spurred like a battle-cry.  Beaten?  Not yet!  “Leap to meet it!  Leap to meet it!”

I caught the blade at my throat with a naked hand.  Hot floods drenched my face.  The earth swam.  We were both in the light now, a bearded man pushing his sword through my hand, and I falling down.  Then my antagonist leaped back with a shivering cry of horror, flung the weapon to the ground and fled into the dark.

And when I sat up my right hand held the hilt of a broken rapier, the left was gashed across the palm, and a sword as like my own as two peas lay at my feet.