tance, loaded two more pistols; and during the
process Major Rickards glanced at the combatants.

Griffith exasperated by his wound and his jealousy, was wearing out the
chivalrous courage of his adversary; and the Major saw it. His keen eye
noticed that Neville was getting restless, and looking confounded at his
despised rival's pertinacity, and that Gaunt was more dogged and more
deadly.

"My man will kill yours this time," said he, quietly, to Neville's
second; "I can see if in his eye. He is hungry: t' other has had his
bellyful."

Once more the men were armed, and the seconds withdrew to their places,
intimating that this was the last shot they would allow under any
circumstances whatever.

"Are you both ready?"

{"Yes."
{
{"Yes."

A faint wail seemed to echo the response.

All heard it, and in that superstitious age believed it to be some
mysterious herald of death.

It suspended even Major Rickards's voice a minute. He recovered himself,
however, and once more his soldier-like tones rang in the keen air:--

"One,----"

There was a great rushing, and a pounding of the hard ground, and a
scarlet Amazon galloped in, and drew up in the middle, right between the
levelled pistols.

Every eye had been so bent on the combatants, that Kate Peyton and her
horse seemed to have sprung out of the very earth. And there she sat,
pale as ashes, on the steaming piebald, and glanced from pistol to
pistol.

The duellists stared in utter amazement, and instinctively lowered their
weapons; for she had put herself right in their line of fire with a
recklessness that contrasted nobly with her fear for others. In short,
this apparition literally petrified them all, seconds as well as
combatants.

And while they stood open-mouthed, yet dumb, in came the Scamp, and,
with a brisk assumption of delegated authority, took Griffith's weapon
out of his now unresisting hand, then marched to Neville. He instantly
saluted Catharine, and then handed his pistol to her seeming agent, with
a high-bred and inimitable air of utter nonchalance.

Kate, seeing them, to her surprise, so easily disarmed, raised her hands
and her lovely eyes to heaven, and, in a feeble voice, thanked God and
Saint Nescioquis.

But very soon that faint voice quavered away to nothing, and her fair
head was seen to droop, and her eyes to close; then her body sank slowly
forward like a broken lily, and in another moment she lay fainting on
the