Amongst his kin, grouped thirty strong about the vault with set faces and hands on sword-hilts, Shameless Wayne stood noticeable; for his head was bent and the tears streamed down his cheeks unheeded. Not until now had the lad reckoned the full total of his past misdoings, nor known how shame can eat the manhood out of bravery.
"Dust to dust, ashes to ashes," said the Parson, in the ringing voice that seemed a challenge to grim Death himself.
But another than Death took up the challenge. Swift out of the moor a cry of "Ratcliffe, Ratcliffe!" answered him, and the crowd gave back on the sudden, leaving the thirty-and-one Waynes to turn face about, whipping their swords free of the scabbards. Down through the wicket-gate trooped a score of Ratcliffes, yelling their name-cry as they came. A moment they halted, for they had looked to find the Waynes unarmed; but the Lean Man cursed them forward.
Shameless Wayne looked up at the first cry; his pale face went ruddy, his eyes lit up. It was a welcome intrusion, this, on the sour trend of his thoughts, and he, who had shown most womanish among them, was now the leader of them all.
"A Wayne! In at them, lads! A Wayne, a Wayne!" he called, and leaped at the Lean Man, and sliced his left ear level with the cheek.
Old Nicholas groaned with pain, then forced a laugh and lifted his big two-handled sword above the head of Wayne of Marsh. But the Waynes came pushing upward from behind, and their leader was thrust against a gravestone on the left hand of the path, while a kinsman took the Lean Man's blow on his own uplifted blade. And after that Wayne mixed with Ratcliffe, and Ratcliffe closed with Wayne, all up and down between the graves, till there was no grass-green footway 'twixt the headstones but was rubbed black under the shifting feet of swordsmen. The crowd fell back for fear, or moved a few steps forward for awe according as the fight swept toward them or away. One against one, or one against two, it was, from the church porch to the field-wall, from the moor-wicket to the Bull; there was no space for a massed fight, and each man sought his special foe and followed him in and out until church-wall, or upreared cross, or spiked hedge of thorn, stopped pursuer and pursued and left no issue but the sword.
Sexton Witherlee found his youth again as he stood just under shelter of the porch, and watched, and rubbed his shrivelled hands together. The old stuff worked in him, and he, who had seen Wayne fight with Ratcliffe more than once, thanked God that the sweetest moil of all had been kept to lighten his last steps to the grave. His eyes went from group to group, from thrust to nimble parry, until the kirkyard held naught for him save the dancing shimmer of grey steel. The cries redoubled, and "Ratcliffe" went in the teeth of "Wayne" all down the pathway of the breeze; yet the Sexton knew, from the snarl that underlay each Ratcliffe voice, from the crisp fury of the Wayne-cry, that the Wildwater folk were going down like windle-straws before their foes. The Ratcliffes took to their pistols then, and hid behind gravestones, and sent red streaks of flame across the mist of whirling steel; but they had no time to reload, and hurry steered their bullets for the most part amiss, and the Waynes, disdaining powder at all times, hunted them from their cover like rats from out a barley-mow. Above all shouts, of onset or of mortal anguish, a lad's voice struck clear into the blue belly of the sky.
"No quarter, Waynes! In at them, and rip from heel to crown!"
Sexton Witherlee moved forward from his porch. "Yond war Shameless Wayne's voice. God, but he's getten th' fighting-fever as hot as iver I see'd a man tak it. Th' Lean Man 'ull carry a sore head back to Wildwater, I'm thinking—if he's spared.—There th' lad is! Sakes, but he's getten his hands as full as they'll hod, an' no mistak!" he broke off, straining his eyes toward the half-filled strip of graveyard beneath the Parsonage which he was wont to call his "bit o' garden." But Nicholas Ratcliffe was ever prudent in his hottest fury, and he saw that the fight was all against his folk. The long night of anguish was over for Wayne's son of Marsh, and the rebound from it had filled his veins with something more like the light fires that played across the boglands than with slow-moving blood; his pace was the wind's pace, and the fury of his onset put life into the sword-arms of each Wayne that heard his lusty battle-cry. Back and further back the Ratcliffes shrank, till the Lean Man's voice was heard, bidding them retreat fighting to the moor-gate and then escape as best they could.
"No quarter!" came Shameless Wayne's trumpet-note, as he chased them to the nearest wicket.