Godefroy, Jack Battle, and I were carried before the charge helpless as leaves in a hurricane.  All slid down the hillside to the bottom of a ravine.  With the long bound of a tiger-spring, Le Borgne plunged through the frost cloud.

The lodges of the victims were about us.  We had evidently come upon the tribe when all were asleep.

Then that dark under-world of which men dream in wild delirium became reality.  Pandemonium broke its bounds.

* * * * * *

And had I once thought that Eli Kirke’s fanatic faith painted too lurid a hell?  God knows if the realm of darkness be half as hideous as the deeds of this life, ’tis blacker than prophet may portray.

Day or night, after fifty years, do I close my eyes to shut the memory out!  But the shafts are still hurtling through the gray gloom.  Arrows rip against the skin shields.  Running fugitives fall pierced.  Men rush from their lodges in the daze of sleep and fight barehanded against musket and battle-axe and lance till the snows are red and scalps steaming from the belts of conquerors.  Women fall to the feet of the victors, kneeling, crouching, dumbly pleading for mercy; and the mercy is a spear-thrust that pinions the living body to earth.  Maimed, helpless and living victims are thrown aside to await slow death.  Children are torn from their mothers’ arms—­but there—­memory revolts and the pen fails!

It was in vain for us to flee.  Turn where we would, pursued and pursuer were there.

“Don’t flinch!  Don’t flinch!” Godefroy kept shouting.  “They’ll take it for fear!  They’ll kill you by torture!”

Almost on the words a bowstring twanged to the fore and a young girl stumbled across Jack Battle’s feet with a scream that rings, and rings, and rings in memory like the tocsin of a horrible dream.  She was wounded in the shoulder.  Getting to her knees she threw her arms round Jack with such a terrified look of helpless pleading in her great eyes as would have moved stone.

“Don’t touch her!  Don’t touch her!  Don’t touch her!” screamed Godefroy, jerking to pull Jack free.  “It will do no good!  Don’t help her!  They’ll kill you both—­”

“Great God!” sobbed Jack, with shivering horror, “I can’t help helping her—­”

But there leaped from the mist a figure with uplifted spear.

May God forgive it, but I struck that man dead!

It was a bootless sacrifice at the risk of three lives.  But so was Christ’s a bootless sacrifice at the time, if you measure deeds by gain.  And so has every sacrifice worthy of the name been a bootless sacrifice, if you stop to weigh life in a goldsmith’s scale!

Justice is blind; but praise be to God, so is mercy!

And, indeed, I have but quoted our Lord and Saviour, not as an example, but as a precedent.  For the act I merited no credit.  Like Jack, I could not have helped helping her.  The act was out before the thought.