ly Bones.

McCraw, stupefied with amazement and rage, stood mopping the blood from
his blotched face, staring at me out of his crazy blue eyes. For a
moment his hand fiddled with his hatchet, then Bones shoved him away,
and he strode off towards his horsemen, who were forming in column
of fours.

"You tell 'em," shouted Bones, "that before we finish him they'll hear
his screams in Albany! If they want Colonel Ormond," he added, his voice
rising to a yell, "tell 'em to send a single man into the sugar-bush.
But if they hang Walter Butler, or if you try to catch us with your
cavalry, we'll take Ormond where we'll have leisure to see what our
Senecas can do with him! Now ride! you damned--"

He struck Sir George's horse with the flat of his hanger; the horse
bounded off, followed by four of McCraw's riders, pistols cocked and
hatchets loosened.

Bruised, dazed, exhausted, I lay there, listening to the receding
thudding of their horses' feet on the moss.

The crisis was over, and I had won--not as I might have chosen to win,
but by a compromise with death for deliverance from temptation.

If it was the compromise of a crazed creature, insane from mental and
physical exhaustion, it was not the compromise of a weak man; I did not
desire death as long as she lived. I dreaded to leave her alone in the
world. But, though she loved him not--and did love me--I could not
accept the future through his sacrifice and live to remember that he had
laid down his life for a friend who desired from him more than he had
renounced.

I was perfectly sane now; a strange calmness came over me; my mind was
clear and composed; my meditations serene. Free at last from hope, from
sorrowful passion, from troubled desire, I lay there thinking, watching
the long, red sun-rays slanting through the woods.

Gratitude to God for a life ended ere I fell from His grace, ere
temptation entangled me beyond deliverance; humble pride in the
honorable traditions that I had received and followed untainted; deep,
reverent thankfulness for the strength vouchsafed me in this supreme
crisis of my life--the strength of a madman, perhaps, but still strength
to be true, the power to renounce--these were the meditations that
brought me rest and a quietude I had never known when death seemed a
long way off and life on earth eternal.

The setting sun crimsoned the pines; the riders were gathered along the
hill-side, bending far out in their saddles to scan the v