"Are you both ready?"
{"Yes."
{"Yes."
A faint wail seemed to echo the response.
All heard it, and in that superstitious age believed it to be some mysterious herald of death.
It suspended even Major Packard's voice a minute. He recovered himself, however, and once more his soldier-like tones ran in the keen air:—
"One——"
There was a great rushing, and a pounding of the hard ground, and a scarlet Amazon galloped in and drew up in the middle, right between the leveled pistols.
Every eye had been so bent on the combatants, that Kate Peyton and her horse seemed to have sprung out of the very earth. And there she sat pale as ashes, on the steaming piebald, and glanced from pistol to pistol.
The duelists stared in utter amazement, and instinctively lowered their weapons; for she had put herself right in their line of fire, with a recklessness that contrasted nobly with her fear for others. In short this apparition literally petrified them all, seconds as well as combatants.