“Am I a fool to put it in your power to murder me?”
“I’ll tell you what, gentlemen,” put in Elizabeth. “Use the swords above the chimney-place, yonder. They are equal.”
“Yes!” cried Peyton.
But Colden said:
“I will not so degrade myself as to cross swords, except on the battle-field, with one who is a rebel, a deserter, and no gentleman.”
Peyton turned to Elizabeth with a smile.
“Then you see, madam,” said he, “’tis no fault of mine if my affronts go unpunished, since this gentleman must keep his courage for the battle-field! Egad,” he added, sacrificing truth for the sake of the taunt, “you Tories need all the courage there you can save up in a long time! I take my leave of this house!”
“‘I TAKE MY LEAVE OF THIS HOUSE!’”
He thrust his sword back into the scabbard, bowed rapidly and low, with a flourish of his hat, and went out by the same door Elizabeth had used in her own moment of triumph. He unbolted the outside door himself, before black Sam could come from the settle to serve him. Snowflakes rushed in at the open door. He plunged into them, swinging the door close after him. Out through the little portico he went, down the walk outside the very parlor window through which he had looked out awhile ago, 249 but through which he did not now look in as he passed; through the gate, and up the branch road to the highway. He was possessed by a confusion of thoughts and feelings,—temporary and superficial elation at having put Elizabeth’s preferred lover in so bad a light, wild ideas of some future crossing of her path, swift dreams of a future conquest of her in spite of all, a fierce desire for such action as would lead to that end. He was eager to rejoin the army now, to participate in the fighting that would bring about the humbling of her cause and make it the more in his power to master her. He heeded little the snow that impeded his steps as his boots sank into it, and which, in falling, blinded his eyes, tickled his face, and clung to his hair. The tumult of flakes was akin to that of his feelings, and he was in mood for encountering such opposition as the storm made to his progress.
Arriving at the post-road, he turned and went northward. At his left lay the great lawn fronting the manor-house, and separated from the road by hedge and palings. He could see, across the snowy expanse, between the dark trunks and whitened branches of the trees, the long front of the manor-house, its roof and its porticoes already covered with snow, the light glowing in the one exposed window of the east parlor. As he quieted down within, he felt pleasantly towards the house, to which his week’s 250 half-solitary residence in it, with the comfort he had enjoyed there and the books he had read, had given him an attachment. He cast on it a last affectionate look, then breasted the weather onward, wondering what things the future might have in store for him.
He had little fear of not reaching the American lines in safety. It was unlikely that any of the enemy’s marauders would be out on such a night, and more unlikely that any regular military movement would be making on the neutral ground. He expected to meet no one on the road, but he would keep a sharp lookout in all directions as he went, and, in case of any human apparition, would take to the fields or the woods. But all the world, thought he, would stay within doors this white night.
Sliding back a part of every step he took in the snow, he passed the boundary of the Philipse lawn, and that of such part of the grounds as included, with other appurtenances, the garden north of the house. He had come, at last, to a place where the fence at his left ended and the forest began. He had, a moment before, cast a long look backward to assure himself the road was empty behind him. He now trudged on, his eyes fixed ahead.
From behind a low pine-tree, at the end of the fence, two dark figures glided up to the captain’s rear, their steps noiseless in the snow. One of them 251 caught both his forearms at the same instant, and pulled them back together, as with grips of iron. A second pair of hands placed a noose about his wrists, and quickly tightened it. Ere he could turn, his first assailant released the bound arms to the second, drew a pistol, and thrust the muzzle close to Peyton’s cheek, whereupon the second man said:
“Your pardon, captain. Come quietly, or you’re a dead man!”
Peyton’s somewhat elate exit from the parlor was followed by a moment of silence and inertia on the part of the three who remained there. But Elizabeth’s chagrin was speedily translated into anger against Major Colden.
“Why didn’t you fight him?” she demanded of that gentleman, who was flinching inwardly, but who maintained a pale and haughty exterior.
“What was the use?” he replied. “He’s reserved for the gallows. If my two men were here! Why not send your servants after him? Sam is a powerful fellow, and Williams is shrewd and strong.”
Elizabeth ignored Colden’s reply, and answered her own question, thus:
“It was because you remembered the time he disarmed you, three years ago.”
“You may think so, if you choose,” he replied, in the patient manner of one who quietly endures unjust reproaches when self-defence is useless.
“You will find refreshments in the dining-room,” said Elizabeth, coldly. “Sam will show you to your room.”
“I would rather remain with you,” he replied.
“I would rather be alone with my aunt a while.”
A deep sigh expressed his dejecting sense of how futile it would be to oppose her.
“As you will,” he then said, and, bowing gravely, left the parlor.
Elizabeth’s feelings now burst out.
“Oh,” she exclaimed to her aunt, “what a chicken-hearted copy of a man! And he calls himself a soldier! I wonder where he found the spirit to volunteer!”
“From you, my dear,” replied Miss Sally. “Didn’t you urge him to take a commission?”
“And that rebel fellow had the best of it all through,” Elizabeth went on. “I was to see him laid low by his rival, as my crowning revenge! How he swaggered out! with what a look of triumph in his eye! And—aunt Sally! He won’t come back! I shall never see him again!”
“Why, child, do you wish to?”
“Of course not! But I can’t have him go away with the laugh on his side! He made me ridiculous after my trying to stab him with my love for the other man. Such another man! Oh, the rebel must come back!”
“But he isn’t likely to,” said Miss Sally.
“Oh, what shall I do?” wailed the niece.
“Elizabeth, I’ll wager you’re still in love with him!”
“I’m not! I hate him!—Well, what if I am? He loved me, I’m sure, the last time he said it. But, good heavens, he’s going farther away every instant!”
She clasped her hands, and, for once, looked at her aunt for help, like a distressed child on the verge of weeping.
“Why don’t you call him back?” said Miss Sally.
“I? Not if I die for want of seeing him!—I know! I will send the servants after him.” And she started for the door, but stopped at her aunt’s comment:
“But that will be as bad as calling him yourself.”
“Not at all, you empty pate!” cried Elizabeth, who had become, in a moment, all action. “While he’s going around by the road, Williams and Sam shall cut across the garden, lie in wait, and take him by surprise. He has no weapon but a broken sword, and they can make him prisoner. They shall bring him back here bound, and he’ll think he’s to be turned over to the British after all!”
“But what then?”
“Why, he shall be left alone here, well guarded, for 255 half an hour, and then I’ll happen in, give him an opportunity to make love again, and I can yield gracefully! Don’t you see?”
“Then you do love him?” said the aunt.
“I don’t know. However, I don’t love Jack Colden. Not a word to him, of this! I’m going to give orders to the men.”
As she entered the hall, she met Colden, who was coming from the dining-room with Mr. Valentine. The major had limited his refreshments to two glasses of brandy and water, swallowed in quick succession. Mr. Valentine, who was smoking his pipe, held Colden fraternally by the arm.
“What, Elizabeth, are you still angry?” said Colden, stopping as she passed.
“Excuse me, I have something to see to,” said the girl, coolly, hurrying away from him.
He made a slight movement to follow her, but old Valentine drew him into the parlor, saying:
“Come, major, you’ll see the lady enough after she’s married to you. I was just going to say, the last lot of tobacco I got—”
“Oh, damn your tobacco!” said the other, jerking his arm from the old man’s tremulous grasp.
“Damn my tobacco?” echoed Mr. Valentine, quite stupefied.
“Yes. I’ve matters more important on my mind just now.”
“The deuce!” cried the old man. “What could be more important than tobacco?”
And he stood looking into the fire, muttering to himself between furious puffs.
Colden sought comfort of Miss Sally. “Was ever a woman as unreasonable as Elizabeth?” he said to her. “She’d have had me lower myself to meet that rebel vagabond as one gentleman meets another.”
But Miss Sally was not going to betray her own disappointment by showing a change from her oft-expressed opinion of the rebel captain,—particularly in the presence of Mr. Valentine. So she answered:
“You met him so once, three years ago.”
“I had a less scrupulous sense of propriety then,” replied Colden, raging inwardly.
“But, as he’s a rebel and deserter,” pursued Miss Sally, “was it not your duty as a soldier to take him, just now?”
“I’d have done so, had my men been here,” growled the major. “Elizabeth ought to’ve had her servants hold him. I had half a mind to order them, in the King’s name, but I never can bring myself to oppose her, she’s so masterful! By George, though, I’ll have him yet! My two fellows will soon come up. They shall give chase. He will leave tracks in the snow.”
Colden went to the window, and peered out as 257 Peyton himself had done not long before. The flakes were coming down as thick as ever.
“I don’t see my rascals yet!” he muttered. “They’ve stopped at the tavern, I’ll warrant.”
And he continued to gaze eagerly out, impatient that his men should arrive before the new-fallen snow should cover his enemy’s tracks.
Old Mr. Valentine, having exhausted his present stock of mutterings, now walked over to Miss Sally, who had sat down near the spinet.
“Miss Williams,” said he, “this is the first chance I’ve had to speak to you alone in a week.”
“But we’re not alone,” said Miss Sally, motioning her head towards Colden.
“He’s nobody,” contemptuously replied the octogenarian. “A man that damns tobacco is nobody. So you may go ahead and speak out. What’s your answer, ma’am?”
“Oh, Mr. Valentine, not now! You must give me time.”
“That’s what you said before,” he complained.
She had, indeed, said it before, scores of times.
“Well, give me more time, then,” she replied.
“How much?” asked the old man, in a matter-of-fact way.
“Oh, I don’t know! Long enough for me to make up my mind.”
Thus far, this conversation had followed in the 258 exact lines of many that had preceded it, but now Mr. Valentine made a departure from the customary form.
“I think,” said he, “if my other two wives had taken as long as you to make up their minds, I shouldn’t have been twice a widower by now.”
“Oh, Mr. Valentine!” said Miss Sally, in a sweetly reproachful way. “Now you know—”
But he cut her speech off short. “Very likely,” said he. “I don’t know. Well, take your time. Only please remember I haven’t so very much time left! Better take me while I’m here to be had! Good night, ma’am!” And he went to the dining-room to fortify himself for his long homeward walk through the snow.
In crossing the hall, he saw Cuff on the settle in Sam’s place. In the dining-room he met Molly, who was clearing the table of the supper that Colden had disdained. He asked her the whereabouts of Williams, and she replied that the steward and Sam had gone out on some order of Miss Elizabeth’s. Deciding to await Williams’s return, the old man sat down before the dining-room fire, and was soon peacefully snoring.
Elizabeth had gone up-stairs to watch from her darkened window the issue of the expedition of Williams and Sam, who had gone out by the kitchen, equipped respectively with rope and pistol. While 259 they were in the immediate vicinity of the house, she could not see them from her elevation, but presently she beheld them glide swiftly across a white open space in the garden, cross a stile, and disappear among the trees and bushes between the garden and the post-road. Turning her eyes to the road itself, that lonely highway now called Broadway,[9] she made out a solitary figure toiling forward through the whirling whiteness,—and she gave a sigh, the deepest and longest with which her frame had ever trembled.
Meanwhile Miss Sally remained in the parlor, thinking it best not to go to Elizabeth unless sent for; while Colden continued to stand at the window, showing his impatience for the arrival of his two soldiers in a tense contracting of the brow, in a restless shifting from foot to foot, and in intermittent stifled curses.
As he kept his eyes on the place where the branch road left the highway, he did not see that part of the lawn walk which led from the garden. But suddenly a slight noise drew his look towards the portico before the east hall.
“Who are these coming?” he cried, startling Miss Sally out of her musings and her chair.
“Are they your men?” she asked, hastening to join him at the window.
“No, mine are mounted,” said he. “Why,—these 260 are Williams and Sam,—and they are bringing,—yes, it is he! They’re bringing him back a prisoner! She has done it, after all, without consulting me!” And he strode to the centre of the room, in the utmost elation.
Miss Sally weakened at the imminent prospect of a meeting between the two enemies in the changed circumstances, and felt the need of her niece’s support.
“I must tell Elizabeth they have him,” she said, and ran out to the east hall, and thence to the dining-room, just in time to avoid seeing Peyton led in through the outer door, which Cuff had opened at Williams’s call.
The steward and Sam conducted their prisoner immediately into the parlor. There Colden stood, with a rancorously jubilant smile, to receive him.
Peyton’s wrists were as Williams had tied them. He was without his hat, which had been knocked off in a brief struggle he had essayed against his captors in a moment when Sam had lowered the pistol. There was a little fresh snow on his hair, and more on his shoulders. The feet of his boots were cased with it. His left arm was held by Williams, who carried the broken sword, having taken it from the scabbard at the first opportunity. Peyton’s other arm was grasped by the huge, bony left hand of Sam, who held the cocked pistol in his right. The 261 two men walked with him to the centre of the parlor, and stopped.
“By George,” said he, turning his face towards Sam, with fire in his eyes, “had the snow not killed the sound of your sneaking footsteps till you’d caught my arms behind, I’d have done for the two of you!”
“Good, Williams!” said Colden. “Place him on that chair, and leave him here with me. But stay in the hall on guard.”
“So Miss Elizabeth ordered us, sir,” said Williams, dryly, and, with Sam, conducted Peyton to the chair, on which he sat willingly.
“Of course she did,” replied Colden. “Was it not at my suggestion?”
Peyton looked sharply up at the major, who regarded him with the undisguised pleasure of hate about to be satisfied.
Williams handed the broken sword to Colden, saying, “This was the only weapon he had, sir. We grabbed him before he could use it. We ran out behind him from the roadside, and he couldn’t hear us for the snow.”
“Ay, or the pair of you couldn’t have taken me!” said Peyton, with hot scorn and defiant gameness.
Colden, with the piece of sword, motioned Williams to go from the room.
“Leave the door ajar a little,” he added, “so you can hear if I call.”
Peyton uttered a short laugh of derision at this piece of prudence. The steward and Sam withdrew to the hall, where Sam remained, while Williams went in search of Elizabeth for further orders. As soon as she had assured herself, by watching and listening, that Peyton was safe in the parlor, she had stolen quietly down-stairs to the dining-room, where she had met her aunt, with whom the steward now found her sitting. She told him to get the duck-gun, make sure it was loaded and primed, and to wait with Sam on the settle in the hall. She then requested her aunt to remain in the dining-room, silently returned to the hall, and took station by the door leading from the parlor,—the door which Williams, at Colden’s command, had left slightly ajar. Her original plan, she felt, might have to be altered by reason of Colden’s having obtruded his hand into the game, a possibility she had not, in roughly sketching that plan, taken into account. It was in order to have the guidance of circumstance, that she now put herself in the way of hearing, unseen, what might pass between the two men. Meanwhile, through the snow-storm, Colden’s two soldiers, who had indeed tarried at the tavern for the heating up of their interiors, were blasphemously urging their sleepy horses towards the manor-house.
In the parlor, the two enemies were facing each 263 other, Peyton on his chair, his tied wrists behind him, Colden standing at some distance from him, holding the broken sword. As soon as they were alone, Peyton uttered another one-syllabled laugh, and said:
“The hospitality of this house beats my recollection. One is always coming back to it.”
“You’ll not come back the next time you leave it!” said Major Colden, his eyes glittering with gratified rancor.
“And when shall that time be?” asked Peyton, airily.
“As soon as two of my men arrive, whom I outrode on my way hither to-night. They attended me out of New York. I shall be generous and give them over to you, to attend you into New York.”
“Thanks for the escort!”
“’Tis the only kind you rebels ever have, when you enter New York,” sneered the major.
“We shall enter it with an escort of our own choosing some day! And a sorry day that for you Tories and refugees, my dear gentleman!”
“But if that day ever comes, you’ll have been rotting underground a long time,—and thanks to me, don’t forget that!”
“Thanks to her, you coward!” cried Peyton. “’Twas she that sent her servants after me! You didn’t dare try taking me, alone!”
“Bah!” said Colden, hotly, “I might have pistolled you here to-night”—and he placed his hand on the fire-arm in his belt—“but for the presence of the ladies!”
“Was it the ladies’ presence,” retorted Peyton, contemptuously, “or the fact that you’re a devilish bad shot?”
Neither man heard the door moved farther open, or saw Elizabeth step through the aperture to the inner side of the threshold, where she stopped and watched. Peyton’s back was towards her, and Colden’s rage at the last words was too intense to permit his eyes to rove from its object.
“Damn you!” cried the major. “I’d show you how bad a shot I am, but that I’d rather wait and see you on the gallows!”
“Will she come to see me there, I wonder?” said Peyton, half thoughtfully. “She ought to, for it’s her work sends me there, not yours! ’Twill not be your revenge when they string me up, my jolly friend!”
Taunted beyond all self-control, the Tory yelled:
“Not mine, eh? Then I’ll have mine now, you dog!”
With that, he strode forward and struck Harry a fierce blow across the face with the flat side of Harry’s own broken sword.
Harry merely blinked his eyes, and did not flinch. 265 He turned pale, then red, and in a moment, first clearing his voice of a slight huskiness, said, quietly:
“That blow I charge against you both,—the lady as well as you!”
Colden had stepped back some distance after delivering the blow. Something in Harry’s answer seemed to infuriate still further the devil awakened in the Tory’s body, for he cried out:
“The lady as well as me,—yes! And this, too!”
And he advanced on Peyton, to strike a second time.
“Stop! How dare you?”
The cry was Elizabeth’s. It startled Colden so that he loosened his hold of the broken sword before he could deliver the blow. At that instant, she caught his arm in her one hand, the sword-guard in her other. She tore the weapon from his grasp, and faced him with a countenance as furious as his own.
“What do you mean?” he cried.
For answer she struck him in the face with the flat of the sword, as he had struck Peyton. “You sneak!” she said.
He recoiled, and stood staring, a ghastly image of bewilderment and consternation. After a moment he turned livid.
“Ah! I see now!” he gasped. “You love him!”
“Yes!” came the answer, prompt and decided.
He gazed at her with such an expression as a 266 painter of hell might put into the face of a lost soul, and he said, faintly, in a kind of articulate moan:
“I might have known!”
Suddenly there came from the outer night the exclamation, quick and distinct:
“Whoa!”
The sound wrought a transformation in Colden. His face lighted up with malevolent joy.
“You love too late!” he cried, to Elizabeth. “My men are there! They shall take him to New York a prisoner, at last!”
“But not delivered up by me, thank God!” replied Elizabeth, while Peyton rose quickly from his chair, and Colden reeled like a drunken man to the window.
She went behind Peyton, and, with the edge of the broken sword, hacked rather than cut through one of the outer windings that bound his wrists together, whereupon she speedily uncoiled the rope.
“You were my prisoner. I set you free!” she said, dropped the rope to the floor, and handed him the broken sword.
He took the weapon in his right hand, and imprisoned Elizabeth with his left arm.
“I’m more your prisoner now than ever!” he said. “You’ve cut these bonds. Will you put others on me?”
“Sometime,—if we can save your life!” she answered.
Both turned their eyes towards Colden.
The Tory officer had drawn his sword, and was motioning, in great excitement, to his soldiers outside.
“This way, men!” he shouted. “To the front door! Damn the louts! Can’t they understand?” He beat upon the window with his sword, knocking out panes of glass. “Come through that door, I say! Quick, curse you, there’s a prisoner here, with a price for his taking! Ay, that’s it! Some one in the hall there, open the front door to my men!”
The sound now came of knocks bestowed on the outside door, and of Sam’s heavy tread on the hall floor.
“Williams! Sam!” shouted Elizabeth. “Don’t let them in!”
The heavy tread was heard to stop short. The knocking on the outer door was resumed.
“Let them in, I say,” roared Colden, too proud to go himself to the door. “I command it, in the name of the King!”
“Obey your mistress,” cried Peyton, to those in the hall. “I command it, in the name of Congress!”
Colden was silent for a moment, then suddenly threw open the window and called out, “This way, men! Quick!”
And he drew pistol, and stood ready with steel 269 and ball to guard the window by which his men were to enter. A new, wild ferocity was on his face, a new, nervous hardness in his body, as if the latent resolution and strength which a prudent man keeps for a great contest, on which his all may depend, were at last aroused. In such a mood, the man who, governed by interest, may have seemed a coward all his life becomes for the once supremely formidable. At last he thinks the stake worth the play, at last the prize is worth the risk, and because it is so he will play and risk to the end, hazarding all, not yielding while he breathes. Having opened the theme which alone, of all themes, shall transform his irresolution into action, he will, Hamlet like, “fight upon this theme until” his “eyelids will no longer wag.” So was Colden aroused, transfigured, as he stood doubly armed by the window, waiting for his men to clamber in.
“What shall we do, dear?” said Elizabeth.
“Fight!” replied Peyton, tightening at the same time his right palm around his broken sword, and his left around the hand she had let him take,—for she had moved from the embrace of his arm.
“Ay, there are only two of them,” she said, as two burly forms appeared in the open window, one behind the other.
“There will be three of us, you’ll find!” cried Colden. “This time I’ll take a hand, if need be.”
“You must not stay here,” said Peyton to Elizabeth, quickly. “Things will be flying loose in a moment!”
“I won’t leave you!” said she.
“Go! I beg you, go!” he said, releasing her hand, and stepping back.
Meanwhile, Colden’s men bounded in through the window. Rough, sturdy fellows were they, who landed heavily on the parlor floor, and blinked at the light, drawing the while the breeches of their short muskets from beneath their coats. Their hats and shoulders were coated with snow.
“Take that rebel alive, if you can!” ordered Colden. “He’s meant to hang! Stun him with your musket-butts!”
The men quickly reversed their weapons, and strode heavily towards Harry. To their surprise, before they could bring down their muskets, which required both hands of each to hold, Harry dashed forward between them, thinking to cut down Colden with his broken sword, possess himself of the latter’s pistol, shoot one of the soldiers, and meet the other on less unequal terms. He saw a possibility of his leaping through the open window and fleeing on one of the soldiers’ horses, but the idea was accompanied by the thought that Elizabeth might be made to suffer for his escape. Her safety now depended on his getting the mastery over his three would-be 271 captors. So, ere the two astonished fellows could turn, Harry had leaped within sword’s reach of his doubly armed enemy.
But Colden was now as alert as rigid, and he opposed his officer’s sword against Peyton’s broken cavalry blade, guarding himself with unexpected swiftness, and giving back, for Harry’s sweeping stroke, a thrust which only the quickest and most dexterous movement turned aside from entering the Virginian’s lungs. As Harry stepped back for an instant out of his adversary’s reach, the Tory raised his pistol. At the same moment the two soldiers, having turned about, rushed on Peyton from behind. He heard them coming, and half turned to face them. Their movement had for him one fortunate circumstance. It kept Colden from shooting, for his bullet might have struck one of his own men.
Now Elizabeth had not been idle. At the moment when Harry had stepped back from her and bade her go, she had run to the door of the east hall, and called Williams and Sam. While Peyton had been engaging Colden near the window, the steward and the negro had entered the parlor, and she had excitedly ordered them to Peyton’s aid. Williams still had the duck-gun, Sam the pistol. Thus it occurred that, as Peyton half turned from Colden towards the two soldiers, these last-named saw Williams and Sam rush in between them and 272 their prey. Before Williams could bring his duck-gun to bear, he was struck down senseless by one of the musket blows first intended for Peyton. Another blow, and from another musket, had been aimed at Sam’s woolly head, but the negro had put up his left hand and caught the descending weapon, and at the same time had discharged his pistol at the weapon’s holder. But Williams, in falling, had knocked against the darky, and so disturbed his aim, and the ball flew wide. The man who had brought down Williams now struck Sam a terrible blow with the musket-club, on the temple, and the negro dropped like a felled ox.
During this brief passage, Peyton had returned to close quarters with Colden. The latter, who had lowered his pistol when his men had last approached Peyton, and who had resumed the contest of swords unequal in size and kind, now raised the pistol a second time. But it was caught by the hands of Elizabeth, who had run around to his left, and who now, suddenly endowed with the strength of a tigress, wrenched it from him as she had wrenched the broken sword earlier in the evening. She tried to discharge the pistol at one of the two soldiers, as they, relieved of the brief interposition of Williams and Sam, were again taking position to bring down their muskets on Peyton’s head while he continued at sword-work with Colden. But the pistol 273 snapped without going off, whereupon Elizabeth hurled it in the face of the man at whom she had aimed. The blow disconcerted him so that his musket fell wide of Peyton, who at the same instant, having seen from the corner of his eye how he was menaced, leaped backward from under the other descending musket. Then, taking advantage of the moment when the muskets were down, he ran to the music seat before the spinet, and mounted upon it, thinking rightly that the infuriated major would follow him, and that he might the better execute a certain manœuvre from the vantage of height. Colden indeed rushed after him, and thrust at him, Peyton sweeping the thrusts aside with pendulum-like swings of his own short weapon. His thought was to send the point that menaced him so astray that he might leap forward and cleave his enemy with a downward stroke before the Tory could recover his guard. But Colden pressed him so speedily that he was at last fain to step up from the music seat to the spinet, landing first on the keyboard, which sent out a frightened discord as he alighted on it. Finding the keys an uncertain footing, he took another step, and stood on the body of the instrument, so that Colden would be at the disadvantage of thrusting upwards. But Colden, seeming to tire a little after a few such thrusts, called to his men:
“Shoot the dog in the legs!”
Both men aimed at once. Elizabeth screamed. Peyton leaped down from his height to the little space behind the spinet projection, where he had hidden a week before. Here he found himself well placed, for here he could be approached on one side only,—unless his adversaries should follow his example and come at him from the top of the spinet.
Colden attacked him with sword, at the open side, and shouted to his men:
“One of you get on the spinet. The other crawl under. We have him now.”
Still guarding himself from his enemy’s thrusts, Peyton heard one of the men leap from the music seat to the spinet, and the other advance creeping, doubtless with gun before him, under the instrument. Peyton sank to his knees, placed his shoulder under the back edge of the spinet’s projection, and, warding off a downward movement of Colden’s sword, turned the instrument over on its side, checking the creeping man under it, and throwing the other fellow to the floor some feet away. As the spinet fell, one of its legs, rising swiftly into the air, knocked Colden’s blade upward, and the Tory leaped back lest Peyton might avail himself of the opening. But the spinet-leg itself hindered Peyton from doing so. Colden rushed forward again, thrusting as he did so. Peyton leaped aside, made a swift half-turn, and landed a stroke on Colden’s sword-hand, making 275 the Tory cry out and drop the sword. Harry put his foot on it and cried:
“You’re at my mercy! Beg quarter!”
But the man who had been thrown from the top of the spinet now returned to the attack, coming around that end of the upset instrument which was opposite the end where Colden had menaced Harry. Seeing this new adversary, Harry retreated past Colden, in order to put himself in position. The soldier hastened after him, with upraised musket. At this moment, Peyton saw himself confronted by Elizabeth, who pulled open the door of the south hall. He stopped short to avoid running against her.
“Save yourself!” she cried, and pushed him through the open doorway, flinging the door shut upon him, a movement which the pursuing soldier, stayed for a moment by collision with Colden, was not in time to prevent. Harry heard the key move in the lock, and knew that Elizabeth had turned it, and that he was safe in the south hall, with a minute of vantage which he might employ as he would.
Elizabeth withdrew the key from the locked door, just as the pursuing soldier arrived at that door. The man, in his excitement, violently tried to open the door. Colden, who was wrapping a handkerchief around his wounded hand, shouted to the man:
“You fool, she has the key! Take it from her!”