Neither man heard the door moved farther open, or saw Elizabeth step through the aperture to the inner side of the threshold, where she stopped and watched. Peyton's back was towards her, and Colden's rage at the last words was too intense to permit his eyes to rove from its object. "Damn you!" cried the major. "I'd show you how bad a shot I am, but that I'd rather wait and see you on the gallows!" "Will _she_ come to see me there, I wonder?" said Peyton, half thoughtfully. "She ought to, for it's her work sends me there, not yours! 'Twill not be _your_ revenge when they string me up, my jolly friend!" Taunted beyond all self-control, the Tory yelled: "Not mine, eh? Then I'll have mine now, you dog!" With that, he strode forward and struck Harry a fierce blow across the face with the flat side of Harry's own broken sword. Harry merely blinked his eyes, and did not flinch. He turned pale, then red, and in a moment, first clearing his voice of a slight huskiness, said, quietly: "That blow I charge against you both,--the lady as well as you!" Colden had stepped back some distance after delivering the blow. Something in Harry's answer seemed to infuriate still further the devil awakened in the Tory's body, for he cried out: "The lady as well as me,--yes! And this, too!" And he advanced on Peyton, to strike a second time. "Stop! How dare you?" The cry was Elizabeth's. It startled Colden so that he loosened his hold of the broken sword before he could deliver the blow. At that instant, she caught his arm in her one hand, the sword-guard in her other. She tore the weapon from his grasp, and faced him with a countenance as furious as his own. "What do you mean?" he cried. For answer she struck him in the face with the flat of the sword, as he had struck Peyton. "You sneak!" she said. He recoiled, and stood staring, a ghastly image of bewilderment and consternation. After a moment he turned livid. "Ah! I see now!" he gasped. "You love him!" "Yes!" came the answer, prompt and decided. He gazed at her with such an expression as a painter of hell might put into the face of a lost soul, and he said, faintly, in a kind of articulate moan: "I might have known!" Suddenly there came from the outer night the exclamation, quick and distinct: "Whoa!" CHAPTER XIV. THE BROKEN SWORD. The sound wrought a transformation in Colden. His face lighted up with malevolent joy. "You love too late!" he cried, to Elizabeth. "My men are there! They shall take him to New York a prisoner, at last!" "But not delivered up by me, thank God!" replied Elizabeth, while Peyton rose quickly from his chair, and Colden reeled like a drunken man to the window. She went behind Peyton, and, with the edge of the broken sword, hacked rather than cut through one of the outer windings that bound his wrists together, whereupon she speedily uncoiled the rope.