with an outcry
of savage glee and hope.

On perceiving this move, in spite of the pain still crippling him, the
old man started to retrace his steps to regain possession of his weapon,
but he was soon distanced by the younger one.

Armed with this staff, the officer, remembering his student days, when
he, too, was an expert swinger of the cane, a Bavarian mountaineer's
weapon with which duels to the death are not unseldom fought, he stood
before the student.

"Had you been a gentleman," began the major, with a sullen courtesy,
extorted from him by the gallantry of his antagonist.

"A stick to a dog!" retorted the latter, falling into the position of
guard with an ease and accuracy which caused the other to begin his work
by feints and attacks not followed up too rashly, in order to test him.

This time, it was the stouter and more brutal man who played cautiously
and the younger and more refined who was spurred into recklessness by
the contiguity of the fair Helen--or, rather, Esther--who had caused the
fray.

The girl stood at the end of the bridge, opposite to Baboushka at hers,
there making them simple lookers-on. The old Jew seemed eager to join
in the struggle, but the staves were in continual swing, and he could
not draw near without the risk of having a shoulder dislocated, or, at
least, his knuckles severely rapped. In the gloom, his hovering about
the involved pair would have led an opera-goer to have seen in him the
demon who thus actively presides at the fatal duel of Faust and
Valentine.

But the conflict, whatever the major's wariness, could not be long
protracted, for canes of this sort are tiring to the arm, unlike
smallswords; he was still on the defensive when the student assailed him
with a shower of blows which taxed all his skill and nerve, and the
strength of the staff which he had borrowed from his foe. Well may one
suspect "the gifts of an enemy!" as the student might have cited:
"_Timeo danaos_," etc. At the very moment when the officer's head was
most in peril, while he guarded it with the staff held horizontally in
both hands separated widely for the critical juncture, it ominously
cracked at the reception of a vigorous blow--it parted as though a steel
blade had severed it, and the unresisted cane came down on his skull
with crushing force.

Out of the two cavities which the broken staff now presented, rattled
several gold coins. At the sight, the old hag scrambled toward where the