Colonel Sevier merely made a little ironical bow and looked at the gentleman beside him.

“I have surrendered to Colonel Love,” he said.

Tipton snatched from his belt the pistol which he might have used on me, and there flashed through my head the thought that some powder might yet be held in its pan.  We cried out, all of us, his men, the widow, and myself,—­all save Sevier, who stood quietly, smiling.  Suddenly, while we waited for murder, a tall figure shot out of the door past the widow, the pistol flew out of Tipton’s hand, and Tipton swung about with something like a bellow, to face Mr. Nicholas Temple.

Well I knew him!  And oddly enough at that time Riddle’s words of long ago came to me, “God help the woman you love or the man you fight.”  How shall I describe him?  He was thin even to seeming frailness,—­yet it was the frailness of the race-horse.  The golden hair, sun-tanned, awry across his forehead, the face the same thin and finely cut face of the boy.  The gray eyes held an anger that did not blaze; it was far more dangerous than that.  Colonel John Tipton looked, and as I live he recoiled.

“If you touch him, I’ll kill you,” said Mr. Temple.  Nor did he say it angrily.  I marked for the first time that he held a pistol in his slim fingers.  What Tipton might have done when he swung to his new bearings is mere conjecture, for Colonel Sevier himself stepped up on the porch, laid his hand on Temple’s arm, and spoke to him in a low tone.  What he said we didn’t hear.  The astonishing thing was that neither of them for the moment paid any attention to the infuriated man beside them.  I saw Nick’s expression change.  He smiled,—­the smile the landlord had described, the smile that made men and women willing to die for him.  After that Colonel Sevier stooped down and picked up the pistol from the floor of the porch and handed it with a bow to Tipton, butt first.  Tipton took it, seemingly without knowing why, and at that instant a negro boy came around the house, leading a horse.  Sevier mounted it without a protest from any one.

“I am ready to go with you, gentlemen,” he said.

Colonel Tipton slipped his pistol back into his belt, stepped down from the porch, and leaped into his saddle, and he and his men rode off into the stump-lined alley in the forest that was called a road.  Nick stood beside the widow, staring after them until they had disappeared.

“My horse, boy!” he shouted to the gaping negro, who vanished on the errand.

“What will you do, Mr. Temple?” asked the widow.

“Rescue him, ma’am,” cried Nick, beginning to pace up and down.  “I’ll ride to Turner’s.  Cozby and Evans are there, and before night we shall have made Jonesboro too hot to hold Tipton and his cutthroats.”

“La, Mr. Temple,” said the widow, with unfeigned admiration, “I never saw the like of you.  But I know John Tipton, and he’ll have Colonel Sevier started for North Carolina before our boys can get to Jonesboro.”