This is how it looked to me, sober and chilled. But after I had got warm before the blazing fire of logs in the tavern bar, and was the better for a hearty swig of fresh-mulled wine, things took on a cheerfuller hue; and when I lighted my tallow dip and went above-stairs to the great barn-like room which had been assigned me, I was turning over in my mind a wild plan of how I might smuggle in a dozen of my fellows from Baylor’s Horse, snatch the traitor out of his bed, and mount and ride and cut the way out to freedom. By which it would appear that the hot wine, poured into an empty stomach, had straightway climbed to the upper story--a thing quite possible, even when one is twenty-two past, a Virginian, and a well-seasoned soldier, to boot. I had no more than struggled out of my watchcoat, and was making ready to tumble into bed, when there came a trampling of heavy feet up the stair and along the corridor. Somewhere about opposite my door the footsteps paused, and I paused, too, with my waistcoat half off and the wine fumes clearing from my brain as swiftly as if a cold north wind were blowing them aside. And, in good truth, I needed to be sobered suddenly, for the next instant the door sprang open as from a lusty kick, and Sergeant-Major John Champe, his saturnine face a devil-mask of furious and frenzied rage, charged in upon me. VII AND AN UNBLEST DAWN THERE was murder in Champe’s bloodshot eyes, and for the moment I was helpless, having the waistcoat bridged across my arms like a hangman’s shackles. Luckily for me, he had no weapon, else it is to be feared I should have quit this troubled scene there and then. As it was, he flung himself upon me like a wild beast, all claws to grip and teeth to tear, and I went down as if I had been a ten-pin, and he a bowl twirled by the hand of the Giant Grim. Also his clutching fingers were at my throat before I could rip and rend that cursed manacling waistcoat into rags; so, by the time my arms were free, the cold dead air of the big room was no longer mine to breathe, and this fickle world, or what little I could see of it, was turning red and green and black and back to red again before my eyes which seemed to be sticking out of my head on a pair of horns like a snail’s. But Baylor’s Horse, or any fraction of it, does not die without a struggle. With my hands free, I got a grip of the black-faced maniac’s wrists, held it, tightened it until I could feel the joints crack and his big fingers relax because there was no longer any living connection between them and the pounding heart and maddened brain. After that it was simpler, though he was the heavier man. With a quick bending of the strangled wrists, I rolled him off of me, holding him so until the red lights stopped their dancing and I could get up with some assurance that I should not be entirely helpless on my feet. Then I loosed him, and staggered upright, reeled across to the door and shut and barred it.