and
the crimson veins in his face looked as if they must burst. He saw me
with my hand over my mouth.

"You warned him, damn you!" he shouted, and turning again leaped to the
porch and tried to squeeze past the widow into the house.

"How dare you, sir?" she shrieked, giving him a vigorous push backwards.
The four of us, his three men and myself, laughed outright. Tipton's
rage leaped its bounds. He returned to the attack again and again, and
yet at the crucial moment his courage would fail him and he would let the
widow thrust him back. Suddenly I became aware that there were two new
spectators of this comedy. I started and looked again, and was near to
crying out at sight of one of them. The others did cry out, but Tipton
paid no heed.

Ten years had made his figure more portly, but I knew at once the man in
the well-fitting hunting shirt, with the long hair flowing to his
shoulders, with the keen, dark face and courtly bearing and humorous
eyes. Yes, humorous even now, for he stood, smiling at this comedy
played by his enemy, unmindful of his peril. The widow saw him before
Tipton did, so intent was he on the struggle.

"Enough!" she cried, "enough, John Tipton!" Tipton drew back
involuntarily, and a smile broadened on the widow's face. "Shame on you
for doubting a lady's word! Allow me to present to you--Colonel Sevier."

Tipton turned, stared as a man might who sees a ghost, and broke into
such profanity as I have seldom heard.

"By the eternal God, John Sevier," he shouted, "I'll hang you to the
nearest tree!"

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 h