Juste Duvarney spoke only once, and then it was but the rancorous word “Renegade!” nor did I speak at all; but Clark was blasphemous, and Gabord, bleeding, fought with a sputtering relish.
“Fair fight and fowl for spitting,” he cried. “Go home to heaven, dickey-bird.”
Between phrases of this kind we cut and thrust for life, an odd sort of fighting. I fought with a desperate alertness, and presently my sword passed through his body, drew out, and he shivered—fell—where he stood, collapsing suddenly like a bag. I knelt beside him, and lifted up his head. His eyes were glazing fast.
“Gabord! Gabord!” I called, grief-stricken, for that work was the worst I ever did in this world.
He started, stared, and fumbled at his waistcoat. I quickly put my hand in, and drew out—one of Mathilde’s wooden crosses.
“To cheat—the devil—yet—aho!” he whispered, kissed the cross, and so was done with life.
When I turned from him, Clark stood beside me. Dazed as I was, I did not at first grasp the significance of that fact. I looked towards the town, and saw the French army hustling into the St. Louis Gate; saw the Highlanders charging the bushes at the Cote Ste. Genevieve, where the brave Canadians made their last stand; saw, not fifty feet away, the noblest soldier of our time, even General Wolfe, dead in the arms of Mr. Henderson, a volunteer in the Twenty-Second; and then, almost at my feet, stretched out as I had seen him lie in the Palace courtyard two years before, Juste Duvarney.
But now he was beyond all friendship or reconciliation—forever.