"By all the saints!" the priest muttered. "'Tis but a half-starved Englishman." Then he shouted his ready challenge to the silent man, who passed immediately with swift movements to the strip of bare ground, and, halting within touch of his enemy, addressed him sternly in the Gallic tongue: "That you may learn, Sir Priest, with whom you have to deal, know that before you stands Sir Thomas Iden, a squire of England and a knight of Kent, a man moreover who has sworn to fight you fairly to the death. Remember you that night on which you put to death a boy in the forest beside Couchicing? That boy was my son, my only child. Sir Priest, you and I have crossed swords before this day. I was then a better man than now; but, with the help of my God and the spirit of my child, I shall lay out your body in this lonely spot for the winds to howl upon, and leave your eyes open for the crows to peck at. I pray you answer only with your sword." Hot words came to La Salle's tongue, but he did not utter them. He found himself daunted by the horror of the place and the unyielding attitude of the knight. As he brought up his renowned right arm, it shivered and the hand was cold. But so soon as their blades met, his fighting spirit arose and conquered the superstitious fear, and a fierce light shone again in his eyes, and the knowledge was borne back upon him that he was in truth the finest swordsman in the New World, and with that he shouted out, "Have at you, heretic dog!" and attacked with all his might. Not a bird moved through the air, not an insect lived upon that hill top, not an animal passed that way. The two men had the gloomy wood to themselves. Not even a breath of wind passed to wave the pines, or scatter into motion last autumn's rusted leaves, which spotted with red the sable rent in the great white sheet which Nature had drawn across the ground. The rhythm of the swords rang monotonously, as the two weird figures drifted to and fro, from side to side of the dusky bluff, struggling the one against the other, with life as the winner's prize. Before the abbé spread his splendid career of power as a prince of the Church. He had but to emerge triumphant from this last taking of the sword to assume the dignity of his new office and realise the ambition of his heart. While the avenger saw neither priest, nor governor, nor fencer of renown, but merely a fellow-being who had extinguished the light of his young son's life.