at the discovery, which he had made early in the combat, that Falcon was at least his peer in swordcraft, while enjoying also the advantage of height and reach.
He had no sense of apprehension or of nervousness. His mind was not here in the moonlit meadow where he was battling with Lance Falcon but in the little lean-to on the mountain top where Jolie Stanwicke was sleeping.
He saw her lying on her couch of boughs, smiling a little, her red-gold hair pushed back from her cool forehead. How beautiful her face was, and how lithe and strong her slim body, and how brave she had been amid all the perils of the wilderness! With a quick thrill of pleasure he recalled how she had learned to love the wilderness, despite its hardships and its terrors; and he wondered dully whether she had learned to love it well enough to go with him to his own land of Tallasee and to dwell with him there.
But that, he told himself calmly, could not be. There was Gilbert Barradell who had her heart and had crushed it, though as yet she did not know that Barradell was false. And there was Lance Falcon, this devil with whom he was fighting—Lance Falcon who loved her as a fiend might love an angel and who would come back to Sani'gilagi with his Spaniards and Spanish Indians and carry her with him to St. Augustine.
The thought stung him to fury. Yet it was like the
