rprise, and the orb shot up ten feet just as Revel
fired.

One bullet wasted. Jerran fired as the echoes of the Mink's shot
racketed away, and the priest crumpled in on himself, a glittering sack
of dead meat.

"You fool!" said Revel, with a brief, pithy anger. "The man I could have
stabbed or broken in two. The sphere is beyond us now." It was slanting
up an invisible incline, faster than he had ever seen one travel before.
"Come on," he snarled. "We've got to travel!" He threw away the useless
gun and ran for his life.

Behind him, to left and then to right, rose the calls. Hoofs thundered,
dogs baying out afresh as they sighted their quarry, and the valley
filled with sound and horses, dogs and men. Over and over the calls
rang, and the air above the fugitives was filled with watching gods.
Revel ran as he had never believed he could run, and the calls, the
calls, the calls beat upon his eardrums....

CHAPTER X

The pretty daughter of the squire,
She gallops down the hill;
The blood of gentry pounds so fierce,
'Tis like to make her ill!

Thinks she, I've come to see his death,
The man who did me shame!
And then she spies him limping there,
All stripped and torn and lame....

--Ruck's Ballad of the Mink

The squire was clad in a sky-blue velvet coat, long and loose with a row
of big silver buttons down the front, a cabbage rose on each flared
lapel, a thick fall of silver lace over an olive-green weskit, lime
breeches in white calf boots. His blunderbuss was tilted carelessly up
over one crooked elbow, for he trusted to the iron-shod hoofs of his
hunting stallion to smash the rebel into the muck of the valley. He was
a portly, floridly handsome man of some thirty summers, and he would not
live to see the sun rise again.

Revel turned at bay. He was just under the overhang of a short cliff, on
his right hand a swamp, on his left a pack of approaching hounds, and
before him the squire on his upreared horse. He had just boosted Jerran
up to the cliff's edge, and the little man was scrambling away, calling
to him to follow; but there was no purchase for his fingers, and the
thing was too high to jump, at least in the brief moment he had. So he
was brought to bay.

The Mink drew his daggers, his fangs of Ewyo's more or less generous
bestowal. The horse poised an instant before bringing its mallet-hoofs
down on his head, and Revel leaped in and thrust--hand