By lantern-light he reads, carelessly at first, then rapidly and eagerly, and at the close he looks long and earnestly at the dead man, and seems to brush away a tear. Strange thing to do over the body of an enemy! Why had fate decreed that they should be enemies? For Waldemar is the half-brother of Percy. His mother was the Indian girl that the earl, now passing his last days in England, had deceived with a pretended marriage, and the letters promise patronage to her son. The half-breed digs a grave that night with his own hands and lays the form of his brother in it.
SAVED BY THE BIBLE
It was on the day after the battle of Germantown that Warner, who wore the blue, met his hated neighbor, the Tory Dabney, near that bloody field.
By a common impulse the men fell upon each other with their knives, and
Warner soon had his enemy in a position to give him the death-stroke, but
Dabney began to bellow for quarter. "My brother cried for quarter at
Paoli," answered the other, "and you struck him to the heart."
"I have a wife and child. Spare me for their sakes."
"My brother had a wife and two children. Perhaps you would like to beg your life of them."
Though made in mockery, this proposition was caught at so earnestly that Warner at length consented to take his adversary, firmly bound, to the house where the bereaved family was living. The widow was reading the Bible to her children, but her grief was too fresh to gather comfort from it. When Dabney was flung into the room he grovelled at her feet and begged piteously for mercy. Her face did not soften, but there was a kind of contempt in the settled sadness of her tone as she said, "It shall be as God directs. I will close this Bible, open it at chance, and when this boy shall put his finger at random on a line, by that you must live or die."
The book was opened, and the child put his finger on a line: "That man shall die."
Warner drew his knife and motioned his prisoner to the door. He was going to lead him into the wood to offer him as a sacrifice to his brother's spirit.
"No, no!" shrieked the wretch. "Give me one more chance; one more! Let the girl open the book."