Half-a-dozen of his men were at his back, and by the light of the lantern, which he carried, she read in their faces their conviction of her guilt. At a sign from their chief they surrounded her in awful silence, and he himself laid his hand heavily on her shoulder: "Murderess!" he said, "thou art taken in thy sin!" "I did it not," cried Mrs. Netterville, so utterly confounded by this terrible accusation that she hardly knew what she said. "So help me Heaven! I am innocent of this deed!" "Innocent! sayest thou?" the officer answered firmly. "Innocent! thou with his blood red upon thy hands! Yea, and thy very garments clotted in his gore! If then thou art innocent, as thou wouldst have us to believe, say what wert thou doing in this lonely spot at an hour when none but the murderer or the wanton would care to be abroad?" "I was returning from a visit to the soldier Jackson--a visit which, as thou knowest, Master Rippel, I pay him every evening at the hour of dusk; and I had well-nigh reached the castle, when hearing a shot in this direction, and fearing mischief either for my own people or for thine, I came hither if possible to prevent it." "A likely story, truly!" replied the officer, who, unluckily for her, was one of the fiercest, if not the saintliest, of the band of warriors then domiciled at the castle. "Nay, woman, and for thine own sake hold thy peace, or out of thine own mouth thou shalt stand presently condemned. For tell me, my masters," he added, addressing the other men, "where will you find a woman, who, hearing a shot, and dreading mischief, would not have fled from the danger, instead of incontinently rushing, as she would have us to believe she did, into its very jaws?" "Yet have I rushed into the jaws of danger more than once already within this fortnight, and that not for the sake of my own people but of thine; as none ought to know better than thou, Master Rippel, and thy comrades," Mrs. Netterville, now fairly put upon her mettle, retorted bravely. "Nay, and that is naught but the very truth, though the father of lies (which is Beelzebub) himself had said it," one of the men here ventured to remark. "For surely, Captain Rippel, you cannot have forgotten that we should have had a soldier the less in the camp of Israel, if she had not nursed the good youth Jackson through this black business of the plague, when we, even we, men anointed and girded to the fight, did hesitate to go near him." {185} "Ha! Dost thou also venture to defend her?" cried the officer angrily. "Nay, then, let that woman which is called Deborah be brought forward and confronted with the prisoner. Her testimony must decide between us."