, our little handful did not
blanch; and when the Guards in midstream held straight across instead of
bearing to the right as the ford ran, a shout went up on our side and
the fifty hastened up from the ford-head as one man to face the enemy
squarely.

Now it was that the brown-barreled rifles began to crack and spit fire;
and I do think if we had had our other two hundred and fifty out of that
back field on the manor lands, we might at least have made the wading
redcoats hurry a little. Indeed, as it was, the van of the Guards broke
here and there, and we could hear O'Hara berating his men as only a
battle-mad Irishman can, with blarneyings and curses intermingled.

Having no firearms save our wetted pistols, Jennifer and I crouched in
cover, waiting to do what two swordsmen might when the blade's length
should bridge the fast-narrowing distance between us and the advancing
host.

'Twas in this little interval of forced inaction that we heard a most
familiar voice issuing from a clump of holly just below our covert; a
voice lifted now in fervent prayer and again in Scriptural anathema on
the foe.

"'Let God arise and let His inimies be scattered.... Let them be as the
chaff upon a threshing-floor'--"

The sharp crack of the old borderer's rifle filled the momentary pause,
and a British officer in a colonel's uniform swayed drunkenly in his
saddle and plunged headlong in the stream.

"'Let them be as the children of Amalek before the Mighty One of Israel:
make them and their princes like Oreb and Zeeb; yea, make all their
princes like as Zebah and Zalmunna.... O my God, make them like unto a
wheel, and as the stubble before the wind; like as the fire that burneth
up the wood, and as the flame that consumeth the mountains.'"

Crack! went the long-barreled piece again, and again an officer
hallooing on his floundering battalion bent to his saddle horn and
slipped into the turbid flood.

My gorge rose. This picking off of officers has always seemed to me the
savagest of war's barbarities. How Richard divined my thought and
purpose, I know not; but when I would have slipped down to Yeates's
holly bush he laid a detaining hand on my arm.

"Let be," he said; "'tis murder, if you like, but all war is that. When
old Eph's turn comes, they will kill him as relentlessly as he is
killing them."

By this time the British vanguard was storming ashore through the
shallows below the tree fringe which served as cover for G