What was there for Marc Dupre in that moment of roused fury,--that
tense moment of awaking rage, of baffled rights of payment?
What but death too swift and unrestrained for torture?
A dozen weapons reached him from as many crowding hands and he went
down on the last earth her feet had trod, the spot where she had last
touched his hand.
Her golden voice, sweet with its sliding minors, was in his ears, the
sweetness of her lips on his.
"A stone to your foot, Ma'amselle," he whispered, as the darkness broke
and the stars began to dance on a sky of blood-red fire; "serve you
with my life,--no better fate,--oh, I love you! I--a stone to your
foot,--Ma'amselle!"
And at that moment Maren Le Moyne, straining every muscle of her young
body to save the man she loved, looked swiftly back, having left the
defile to stagger, stumbling, southward to where Mowbray's men waited
with the canoe.
She saw the sudden flaming of the torch, the slim, boyish figure in its
buckskins, the ring of faces, and the flash of weapons; saw the forms
close in and the slim boy go down like a reed in the winter storm, and
a cry broke from her lips as De Courtenay's rifle began to sound in the
gorge.
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