So unexpected was the assault that, strong man as Greatorix was, he had not the least chance of resistance.  He reeled at the sudden constriction of his throat by hands that hardly seemed human, so wide was their clutch, so terrible the stringency of their grasp.  He struck wildly at his assailant, but, lying on his back with the biting and strangling thing above him, his arms only met on one another in vain blows.  He felt the teeth of a great beast meet in his throat, and in the sudden agony he sent abroad the mighty roar of a man in the grips of death by violence.  But his assailant was silent, save for a fierce whinnying growl as of a wild beast greedily lapping blood.

It was this terrible outcry ringing across the hills that brought the farm steading suddenly awake, and sent the lads swarming about the house with lanterns.  But it was Ralph alone who, having heard the first cry of his love and listened to nothing else, ran onward, bending low with a terrible stitch in his side which caught his breath and threw him to the ground almost upon the white-wrapped body of his love.  Hastily he knelt beside her and laid his hand upon her heart.  It was beating surely though faintly.

But on the other side, against the gray glimmer of the march dyke, he could see the twitchings of some great agony.  At intervals there was the ghastly, half-human growling and the sobbing catch of some one striving for breath.

A light shone across the moor, fitfully wavering as the searcher cast its rays from side to side.  Ralph glanced behind him with the instinct to carry his love away to a place of safety.  But he saw the face of Meg Kissock, with slow Jock Forrest behind her carrying a lantern.  Meg ran to the side of her mistress.

“Wha’s dune this?” she demanded, turning fiercely to Ralph.  “Gin ye—­”

“I know nothing about it.  Bring the lantern here quickly,” he said, leaving Winsome in the hands of Meg.  Jock Forrest brought the lantern round, and there on the grass was Agnew Greatorix, with daft Jock Gordon above him, his sinewy hands gripping his neck and his teeth in his throat.

Ralph pulled Jock Gordon off and flung him upon the heather, where Jock Forrest set his foot upon him, and turned the light of the lantern upon the fierce face of a maniac, foam-flecked and blood-streaked.  Jock still growled and gnashed his teeth, and struggled in sullen fury to get at his fallen foe.  With his hat Ralph brought water from a deep moss-hole and dashed it upon the face of Winsome.  In a little while, she began to sob in a heartbroken way.  Meg took her head upon her knees, and soothed her mistress, murmuring tendernesses.  Next he brought water to throw over the face and neck of Greatorix, which Jock Gordon in his fury had made to look like nothing human.

The rest might wait.  It was Ralph’s first care to get Winsome home.  Kneeling down beside her he soothed her with whispered words, till the piteous sobbing in her throat stilled itself.  The ploughman was at this moment stolidly producing pieces of rope from his pockets and tying up Jock Gordon’s hands and feet; but after his first attempts again to fly at Greatorix, and his gasps of futile wrath when forced into the soft moss of the moor by Jock Forrest’s foot, he had not offered to move.