"A duel between gentlemen!" the Captain cried.
The Prince gave a short laugh. "You shall have no such plea at the court-martial," he said. "Gentlemen don't waylay one another in the streets. Stand aside!"
Mistitch laughed, and in an instant the Prince sprang at him. Sophy heard the blades meet. Strong as death was the fascination for her eyes—ay, for her ears, too, for she heard the quick-moving feet and the quicker breathing of a mortal combat. But she would not look—she tried not even to listen. Her eyes were for a man she could not see, her ears for a man she could not hear. She remembered the lean fellow hidden in the porch, straight under her window. She dared not call to warn the Prince of him; a turn of the head, a moment of inattention, would cost either combatant his life. She took the man in the porch for her own adversary, his undoing for her share in the fight.
Very cautiously, making no sound, she took the heavy lamp—the massive bronze figure of the girl—raised it painfully in both her hands, and poised it half-way over the window-sill. Then she turned her eyes down again to watch the mouth of the porch. Her rat was in that hole! Yet suddenly the Prince came into her view; he circled half-way round Mistitch, then sank on one knee; she heard him guard the Captain's lunges with lightning-quick movements of his nimble scimitar. He was trying the old trick they had practised for hundreds of years at Volseni—to follow his parry with an upward-ripping stroke under the adversary's sword, to strike the inner side of his forearm and cut the tendons of the wrist. This trick big Captain Mistitch, a man of the plains, did not know.
A jangle—a slither—a bellow of pain, of rage! The Prince had made his stroke, the hill-men of Volseni were justified of their pupil. Mistitch's big sword clattered on the flags. Facing his enemy, with his back to the porch, the Prince crouched motionless on his knee; but it was death to Mistitch to try to reach the sword with his unmaimed hand.
It was Sophy's minute; the message that it had come ran fierce through all her veins. Straining to the weight, she raised the figure in her hands and leaned out of the window. Yes, a lean hand with a long knife, a narrow head, a spare, long back, crept out of the darkness of the porch—crept silently. The body drew itself together for a fatal spring on the unconscious Prince, for a fatal thrust. It would be death—and to Mistitch salvation torn from the jaws of ruin.
"Surrender yourself, Captain Mistitch," said the Prince.
Mistitch's eyes went by his conqueror and saw a shadow on the path beside the porch.
"I surrender, sir," he said.
"Then walk before me to the barracks." Mistitch did not turn. "At once, sir!"