that circle of spectators. Falcon's men knew a swordsman when they saw one, and the blades had scarcely crossed before those veterans gave O'Sullivan his due. It was then that he of the yellow scarf and the earrings stretched himself upon the ground to rest his limbs while he watched. He counted himself a connoisseur, this pock-marked cutthroat, and he saw this fight as no three-minute affair. He had no doubt of the outcome, for he had followed Falcon for years and had seen him in action many times; but he figured the little white-haired man a hard nut to crack.
A horror came upon Meg Pearson. It drove the colour from her furrowed cheeks and set her limbs shaking. It was a horror of the swords. Like serpents' tongues they were, the darting, flickering tongues of deadly serpents. She could not get the thought out of her head; it possessed her utterly and turned her blood to icy water.
She had seen men fight and die. She had seen knives flash and strike home in the frequent brawls of the hard-bitten pack-horse men. She had heard the whine of arrows and the hum of rifle bullets in Indian ambuscades along the Great Wilderness Path. She had seen the bodies of women, their heads still bloody where the scalps had been lifted. Yet now there was an unknown horror upon her, and the courage was gone from her, and her eyes were wide with terror of those darting, flickering serpent-tongues of steel.
To Meg there was something in the spectacle that
