sion gone from my
heart.

MacLachlan showed no such dubiety. "What ails you at the place?" he
asked, throwing his plaid to his servant, and running his jacket off
its wooden buttons at one tug. "It seems to me a most particularly fine
place for our business. But of course," he added with a sneer, "I have
not the experience of two soldiers by trade, who are so keen to force
the combat."

He threw off his belt, released the sword from its scabbard--a clumsy
weapon of its kind, abrupt, heavy, and ill-balanced, I could tell by its
slow response to his wrist as he made a pass or two in the air to get
the feel of it. He was in a cold bravado, the lad, with his spirit
up, and utterly reckless of aught that might happen him, now saying
a jocular word to his man, and now gartering his hose a little more
tightly.

I let myself be made ready by John Splendid without so much as putting
a hand to a buckle, for I was sick sorry that we had set out upon this
adventure. Shall any one say fear? It was as far from fear as it was
from merriment. I have known fear in my time--the fear of the night, of
tumultuous sea, of shot-ploughed space to be traversed inactively and
slowly, so my assurance is no braggadocio, but the simple truth. The
very sword itself, when I had it in my hand, felt like something alive
and vengeful.

Quick as we were in preparing, the sun was quicker in descending, and
as we faced each other, without any of the parades of foreign fence, the
sky hung like a bloody curtain between the trees behind MacLachlan.

M'Iver and the servant now stood aside and the play began. MacLachlan
engaged with the left foot forward, the trick of a man who is used to
the targaid, and I saw my poor fool's doom in the antiquity of his first
guard. In two minutes I had his whole budget of the art laid bare to
me; he had but four parries--quarte and tierce for the high lines, with
septime and second for the low ones--and had never seen a counter-parry
or lunge in the whole course of his misspent life.

"Little hero!" thought I, "thou art a spitted cockerel already, and yet
hope, the blind, the ignorant, has no suspicion of it!"

A faint chill breeze rose and sighed among the wood, breathed from the
west that faced me, a breeze bearing the odour of the tree more strong
than before, and of corrupt leafage in the heughs. Our weapons tinkled
and rasped, the true-points hissed and the pommels rang, and into the
midst of this song of murder