the advantage in skill. His sword grazed my forehead almost at the
moment when mine sank into the joint in his neck. He fell against
the statue, like Caesar against Pompey's, hanging on to the iron
rail; his sword was already broken. When I saw the blood from that
deadly wound, everything else went from me; I dropped my sword and
ran as if to lift him up. As I bent toward him something happened
too quick for me to follow. I do not know whether the iron bar was
rotted with rust and came away in his hand, or whether he rent it
out of the rock with his apelike strength; but the thing was in his
hand, and with his dying energies he swung it over my head, as I
knelt there unarmed beside him. I looked up wildly to avoid the
blow, and saw above us the great bulk of Britannia leaning outward
like the figurehead of a ship. The next instant I saw it was leaning
an inch or two more than usual, and all the skies with their
outstanding stars seemed to be leaning with it. For the third second
it was as if the skies fell; and in the fourth I was standing in the
quiet garden, looking down on that flat ruin of stone and bone at
which you were looking to-day. He had plucked out the last prop that
held up the British goddess, and she had fallen and crushed the
traitor in her fall. I turned and darted for the coat which I knew
to contain the package, ripped it up with my sword, and raced away
up the garden path to where my motor bike was waiting on the road
above. I had every reason for haste; but I fled without looking back
at the statue and the body; and I think the thing I fled from was
the sight of that appalling allegory.

"Then I did the rest of what I had to do. All through the night and
into the daybreak and the daylight I went humming through the
villages and markets of South England like a traveling bullet, till
I came to the headquarters in the West where the trouble was. I was
just in time. I was able to placard the place, so to speak, with the
news that the government had not betrayed them, and that they would
find supports if they would push eastward against the enemy. There's
no time to tell you all that happened; but I tell you it was the day
of my life. A triumph like a torchlight procession, with torchlights
that might have been firebrands. The mutinies simmered down; the men
of Somerset and the western counties came pouring into the market
places; the men who died with Arthur and stood firm with Alfred. The
Irish regim