"It is painful, terrible--"
He could not go on, but stood before her unmanned. In the feeble
light his face was wan and his hurt shoulder, still in bandages,
drooped perceptibly.
"I surrender to you," she presently said in French, extending the
hilt of her rapier to him. "I had to defend myself when attacked
by your Lieutenant there. If an officer finds it necessary to set
upon a girl with his sword, may not the girl guard her life if she
can?"
She was short of breath, so that her voice palpitated with a
touching plangency that shook the man's heart.
Farnsworth accepted the sword; he could do nothing less. His duty
admitted of no doubtful consideration; yet he hesitated, feeling
around in his mind for a phrase with which to evade the
inevitable.
"It will be safer for you at the fort, Mademoiselle; let me take
you there."
CHAPTER XIII
A MEETING IN THE WILDERNESS
Beverley set out on his mid-winter journey to Kaskaskia with a
tempest in his heart, and it was, perhaps, the storm's energy that
gave him the courage to face undaunted and undoubting what his
experience must have told him lay in his path. He was young and
strong; that meant a great deal; he had taken the desperate
chances of Indian warfare many times before this, and the danger
counted as nothing, save that it offered the possibility of
preventing him from doing the one thing in life he now cared to
do.
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