It was a carnage then. Five Ratcliffes dropped at the first shock, ten at the next onslaught. The rest fled headlong toward the great main door, and tried to open it; but Red Ratcliffe had made the bolts too sure, and they were caught in their own trap. Snarling, they turned at bay, and showed a serried line of faces, lean, vindictive, bright-eyed as the weasel’s whom tradition named their ancestor. Those who fell writhed upward from the floor and tried to drive their blades home; and the Waynes, with low, hoarse cries, put each a foot on the skulls of the fallen, and fought on in this wise least the dying, weasel-like to the end, should prove twice as dangerous as those whose limbs were whole. Janet had followed the battle as best she could. She had heard the feud-calls swell, and weaken, and grow loud again; had heard Mistress Wayne’s shrill cry of Barguest. And then her lover’s voice rose swift in victory above the growling hum of "Ratcliffe! A Ratcliffe!" And she knew that Wayne of Marsh had wiped his shame clean out at last. Red Ratcliffe and two others were all who stood upright now, and they were fighting behind a bank of fallen comrades. "Quarter!" gasped Ratcliffe, full of a fresh stratagem. "Not again," laughed Wayne. "We courteous fools are out of mood to-night, Red Ratcliffe." "Quarter! We’re defenceless, Wayne. Would’st butcher us?" "Ay, would I," answered Wayne of Marsh, and cut at Ratcliffe’s head-guard, and grazed his scalp as his own blade slid down the other’s steel. "Thou’st made a priest of him!" roared Griff, beside himself with the reek of slaughter. "Look at his bloody tonsure, Ned." Red Ratcliffe flung his sword in the lad’s face, and picked up a dying Ratcliffe in his arms. Fury lent sinew to despair; a moment he staggered under the body, then hurled it full at Shameless Wayne and drove him blundering half across the floor. And then he raced down the pathway he had made, and gained the hinder door, forgotten until now, and clashed it to behind him. The passage was pitch-dark, with a sharp turn and three unlooked-for steps half down it; and his first thought was to pick off the Waynes who followed as they stumbled in the darkness, and afterward to make good his escape in such rough-ready fashion as the ensuing uproar might suggest. He halted awhile, waiting their coming, while his breath came and went in hard-won sobs; then, as his brain cooled, he bethought him of the narrow, winding passage that branched oft from the one in which he stood and led at one end to a rarely opened door that backed the orchard, at the other to the room where his Cousin Janet lay.