A struggle, hand to hand, between two combatants so disproportioned, could not, consequently, be long doubtful as to its issue.  No sooner had the formidable Yankee closed with his enemy, than, pressing the knuckles of his iron hand which met round the body of the officer, with violence against his spine, he threw him backwards with force upon the sands.  Grasping his victim with one hand as he lay upon him, he seemed, as Grantham afterwards declared, to be groping for his knife with the other.  The settler was evidently anxious to despatch one enemy, in order that he might fly to the assistance of his son, for it was he whom Middlemore, with a powerful effort, had dragged from the canoe to the beach.  While his right hand was still groping for the knife—­an object which the powerful resistance of the yet unsubdued, though prostrate, officer rendered somewhat difficult of attainment —­the report of a pistol was heard, fired evidently by one of the other combatants.  Immediately the settler looked up to see who was the triumphant party.  Neither had fallen, and Middlemore, if any thing, had the advantage of his enemy; but to his infinite dismay, Desborough beheld a horseman, evidently attracted by the report of the pistol, urging his course with the rapidity of lightning, along the firm sands, and advancing with cries and vehement gesticulations to the rescue.

Springing with the quickness of thought from his victim, the settler was in the next moment at the side of Middlemore.  Seizing him from behind by the arm within his nervous grasp, he pressed the latter with such prodigious force as to cause him to relinquish, by a convulsive movement, the firm hold he had hitherto kept of his adversary.

“In, boy, to the canoe for your life,” he exclaimed hurriedly, as following up his advantage, he spun the officer round, and sent him tottering to the spot were Grantham lay, still stupified and half throttled.  The next instant saw him heaving the canoe from the shore, with all the exertion called for by his desperate situation.  And all this was done so rapidly, in so much less time than it will take our readers to trace it, that before the horseman, so opportunely arriving, had reached the spot, the canoe, with its inmates, had pushed from the shore.

Without pausing to consider the rashness and apparent impracticability of his undertaking, the strange horseman, checking his rein, and burying the rowels of his spurs deep into the flanks of his steed, sent him bounding and plunging into the lake, in pursuit of the fugitives.

He himself evinced every symptom of one in a state of intoxication.  Brandishing a stout cudgel over his head, and pealing forth shouts of defiance, he rolled from side to side on his spirited charger, like some labouring bark careening to the violence of the winds, but ever, like that bark, regaining an equilibrium that was never thoroughly lost.  Shallow as the lake was at this point for a considerable