What followed was a nightmare to the lookers-on. They saw the volunteers reach the wall and clamber up—saw a fierce hand-to-hand struggle on the wall-top, and the assault repulsed. And then they saw the victors on the rampart kill the wounded in cold blood. Some pity, bred of bygone Stuart generations, stirred Rupert. Wrath and tears were so mingled that his voice was harsh. "I give you freedom, Derby, to lead the next attack." Without pause or word of thanks, Lord Derby got his own company together. "We fight for my wife, who holds Lathom well," he said to his men. Then they ran to the attack. Kit, looking on, was astonished to see that Prince Rupert, who had talked of prudence where lives of great men were concerned, was running with the privates of Lord Derby’s company. So he, too, ran. The fight on the wall was bitter, but the King’s men prevailed. Over the bodies of their friends, massacred against all rules of war, they leaped into the town. The first man Lord Derby met was a groom, lately in his service at Lathom, who had gone over to the enemy. The man struck a blow at him with the clubbed end of a musket, and Derby parried it, and gave the rogue a better death than he deserved—at the sword’s point. They pressed forward. Once they were hemmed in—six of them—after a fierce rally of the garrison had swept the Royalists aside. One of the six was Prince Rupert; and Kit Metcalf felt the old Yoredale loyalty stir in his veins—a wildness and a strength. He raised a deep-bellied cry of "A Mecca for the King!" cut down the thick-set private who was aiming a blow sideways at Rupert’s head, and then went mad with the lust of slaying. Never afterwards could he recall that wonderful, swift lunacy. Memory took up the tale again at the moment when their comrades rallied to their help and thrust back the garrison. Three of the six were left—the Prince, and Kit, and a debonair, grey-eyed gentleman whose love-locks were ruddied by a scalp-wound. The three went forward with the rest; and, after all was done, they met again in the market-square. "You, my White Knight?" said the Prince, touching Kit on the arm. "Are you touched? No more than the gash across your cheek? I’m glad of that. Captain Roger Nowell here tells me that I should be lying toes up to the sky if your pike had not been handled nicely. For my part, I saw nothing but Roundhead faces leering at me through a crimson mist." The instinctive, boyish romance came back to Christopher. He had always been a hero-worshipper, and turned now to the grey-eyed gentleman, who was bandaging his head with a strip torn from his frilled shirt. "You are of the Nowells of Reed Hall?" he asked. "I am, sir—a queer, hot-headed lot, but I’m one of them." "My nurse reared me on tales of what your folk did in days gone by. And at Lathom they told me of your sorties. Sir, they thought you dead in your last effort to break through the lines, to bring relief in. They will be glad."