When he had run the full gamut of abuse, and was fairly at a stand for fresh epithets, I took him up, not angrily, for, strange as it may seem, I could not for the life of me stir the hot rage that had twice or thrice made me so eager to kill him.
“You say I am a coward, Seytoun, and that is a harsh word to fling at a dying man. What have I ever done to you, more than to post you in the tidewater country for killing my cousin Devlin Page over a game of cards without giving the poor lad a tenth of a chance to defend himself?” I asked.
“You posted me, and you have struck me twice without giving me a chance to kill you!” he raged. “On top of that you have eaten insults that would have made a horse-boy fight!”
“Um,” said I. “If I have eaten at your table, I have also made you eat at mine. And I had a much better cause than you, Wolf Seytoun,” I added, giving him the name he went by in Virginia. “The woman who loves me, and who will loathe and despise you to her dying day for this night’s work, begged me to spare you—for the sake of our common country—and I gave her my promise.”
“By heaven!” he shouted, “you’ll taunt me with that? I tell you, Beatrix Leigh will—”
“Hold on,” I warned, raising a hand in deprecation. “That makes twice you have used her name to me within five minutes. Don’t do it again!”
“What’s to stop me if I name her a hundred million times?” he bellowed.
“This,” I said, taking up the sword that Castner had flung upon the bed. And still I was not angry.
His first act was the craven cur’s: a swift glance over his shoulder to see if haply the door had been left ajar to let him run; his next was the trapped wolf’s: a whipping-out of his saber, and a lightning-like launching of his great body in a rush that was meant to slay me before I could get upon my feet.
The attack failed only because I was fully expecting it; but the warding of the murderous saber cut snapped my borrowed weapon short off at the hilt. It was here that John Champe’s devotion surely saved my life. But for his smuggling of the Scots rapier under his coat, I should have been left unarmed and helpless, and Seytoun would certainly have slain me like a dog.