Suddenly from that gray picketed line of logs broke a zigzag streak of fire, and out into the stillness boomed the sound of guns. "We are betrayed!" muttered Claiborne, turning at the head of the steps, out of breath with the climb. "Follow me!" cried Richard Ingle. "Twenty pounds to the first man over the wall, or through the gate!" "Ingle! Ingle!" the cry rose from all sides, as the men rushed after their leader toward the stockade. Several fell; but the others closed in and rushed on the faster. "I fear they're too many for us!" muttered Giles Brent, as he peered through the peep-hole of the gate. "If we could have had the news but a few hours earlier! Fire at the tall man with the green cap, Neville!--and there's Ingle, the same swashbuckler as ever! But he's a brave devil. Gather the guard, Neville. Open on them with the culverin; if they break in the gate, give them clubbed muskets: _Hey for St. Mary's, and wives for us all!_" No man who took part in that morning's fight ever forgot the day. Almost every fighter had his private feud to avenge, and under the guise of sustaining his colony, slashed and hacked for St. Mary, or St. Richard Ingle, and broke heads in fine style, all for the honor of the Commonwealth or the Palatinate in general, and the satisfaction of James and John and Robert in particular. Oh, but it was a fine skirmish! and when the invaders, despite the thunder of the culverin, broke in the iron-studded gate and rushed upon the defenders, the fighting took on still more interest. If there is pleasure in knocking over your enemy at a distance with a cannon-ball, it is as nothing to the joy of felling him with your clubbed musket, where he can claim no foul, no better armament, but must acknowledge as he falls, that he dies because you are the better man, and surrender his pride before he gives up the ghost. Who would not throw away years of inglorious safety to know the mad leap of the blood bounding along his veins as he cut and thrust and parried in the rough give and take of battle? When the Anglo-Saxon forgets that stern ecstasy, his domination of the earth is at an end. There is, however, one class to whom the struggle brings little of this exhilaration. The non-combatants bear the heart-breaking anxieties of the combat and know nothing of its delights. Little did Elinor Calvert know or care about the effect of fighting on national character as she stood at the door of her cottage in the little hamlet of St. Mary's, holding her boy by the hand. Her heart had room for only one thought,--terror,--not so much for herself as for her child. "But surely," she thought, "none could be so cruel as to harm him!" and she looked down on his yellow curls and drew him closer, and folded her cloak about him as though that feeble shelter could avail anything against men with hearts of steel and arms of iron. Her mind was still bewildered with the suddenness of the excitement.