truggled to his feet Lady Agatha, who had grasped a cutlass, cut the
fellow down. The man fell back over the rail with a cry.

For a long moment there was one continuous electric flash from horizon
to horizon, and Cleggett saw her, with windblown hair and wide eyes and
parted lips, standing poised with the red blade in her hand beneath the
driving clouds, the figure of an antique goddess.

The next instant all was dark; her arms were around his neck in the
rain. "Oh, Clement," she sobbed, "I've killed a man! I've killed a
man!"

CHAPTER XVI

ROMANCE REGNANT

Cleggett kissed her....

CHAPTER XVII

MISS PRINGLE CALLS ON MR. CLEGGETT

But the rushing onset of events struck them apart. Out of the night
leaped danger, enhancing love and forbidding it. From the starboard
bow Captain Abernethy shrilled a cry of warning, and the heavy,
bellowing voice of Loge shouted an answer of challenge and ferocity.
The wind had fallen, but the lightning played from the clouds now
almost without intermission. Cleggett saw Loge and his followers,
machete in hand, flinging themselves at the rail. They lifted a hoarse
cheer as they came. The fire from the Jasper B. had checked the
assault temporarily; it had not broken it up; once they found lodgment
on the deck the superior numbers of Loge's crowd must inevitably tell.

Loge was a dozen feet in advance of his men. He had cast aside the
light sword which belonged to Cleggett, and now swung a grim machete in
his hand. Cleggett flung down his gun, grasped a cutlass, and sprang
forward, his one idea to come to close quarters with that gigantic
figure of rage and power.

But before Loge reached the bulwark on one side, and while Cleggett was
bounding toward him on the other, this on-coming group of Cleggett's
foes were suddenly smitten in the rear as if by a thunderbolt. Out of
the night and storm, mad with terror, screaming like fiends, with
distended nostrils and flying manes and flailing hoofs, there plunged
into the midst of the assaulting party a pair of snow-white
horses--astounding, felling, trampling, scattering, filling them with
confusion. A rocking carriage leaped and bounded behind the furious
animals, and as the horses struck the bulwark and swerved aside, its
weight and bulk, hurled like a missile among Cleggett's staggered and
struggling enemies, completed and confirmed their panic.

No troops on earth can stand the shock of a cavalry charge in the