"I should like to see the Dane."
"Well, you will, if you come with me. There's the cottage."
They had turned a bend and the head of the dale lay before them, a mere dimpling depression between breasts of chalky grass. Set close by the way on a cross-track, which forded the brook by stepping stones and went on over the downs to Amesbury, stood a small, square, tumbledown cottage, its door opening on primeval turf, though behind it a plot of garden enclosed in a quickset hedge provided Mrs. Janaway with cabbages and gooseberries and sour apples and room to hang out the clothes.
"Ben won't be in, but Billy will be looking after Clara. Billy is no good with the sheep, but he's death on tramps. In fact if I weren't here it wouldn't be too safe for you to go to the door. A Dane can pull any man down: I've heard even Jack Bendish say he wouldn't care to tackle him—"
Even Jack Bendish! Lawrence smiled. He felt the prick of Isabel's blade, it amused him, automatically he reacted to it, she made him want to fight the Dane first and Jack Bendish afterwards—but he retained just too much of the ascendancy of his six and thirty years to gratify her by self-betrayal. "You're a very brave young lady," he said cheerfully, "but if I were Val—"
He stopped short. From the cottage window, now not twenty yards off, there had come a burst of the most appalling screams he had ever heard in his life, the mechanical screaming of mortal agony. Isabel went as white as chalk and even Hyde felt the blood turn cold at his heart. Next moment the door was torn open and out of it came a big red-bearded man, dressed in a brown tweed jacket and velveteen trousers tied at the knees, and prancing high in a solemn jig. In one hand he held up an iron stake and in the other a rag of red and black carpet . . . the body of a woman in a black dress, her arms and legs hanging down, her face a scarlet mask that had ceased to scream.
"Keep back, Isabel," said Lawrence: then, running across the turf, "Drop that, Janaway! drop her!" in the hard authoritative voice of the barrack square. With the fitful docility of the mad, Janaway obeyed, and directly he did so Lawrence checked and stood on the defensive, taking a moment to collect his wits—he had need of them: he had to make his head guard his hands. He was a tall powerful man, but so was the shepherd: to offset Hyde's science, Janaway was mad and would be stopped by no punishment short of a knock-out blow: and Lawrence carried only an ordinary walking-stick, while Janaway had hold of an upright from a bit of iron railing, five feet long and barbed like a spear.
"If he whacks me over the head with that or jabs it into my stomach, I'm done," Lawrence thought, and pat to the moment Janaway, his mouth open and his teeth bare, rushed on him and struck at his eyes. Lawrence parried and sprang aside: but his arm was jarred to the elbow. "That was a close call. Ha! my chance now . . ." Like a flash, as Janaway turned, Lawrence ran in to meet him body to body, seized him by the lapels of his coat, pinned down his arms, set one foot against his thigh, and with no great exertion of strength, by the Samurai's trick of falling with one's enemy, heaved him up and shot him clean over his own shoulder: then, as they dropped together, struck with his wrist a paralysing blow at the base of the spine. Janaway's yell of fury was choked into a rattling groan.
Lawrence was up in a twinkling, but the shepherd lay where he had fallen, and Lawrence let him lie: he knew that, so handled, the victim could be counted out of action, perhaps for good and all. He stood erect, breathing deep. Ben could wait, but what of Mrs. Ben? He was shocked to find Isabel already at her side on the reddened turf.
Mechanically Lawrence picked up his stick before he went to join her. Clara was huddled up over a pool of blood, her head between her knees: not a pleasant sight for a young girl. But Isabel, though white and trembling, was collected. "I can't feel her heart, I—I'm afraid—"