With several of ours, who had thrown off their knapsacks, bearskins, and everything that might impede them, I sprang away in pursuit. Being more active and lithe than my companions, I soon distanced them in climbing with my musket slung, and in my energy using hands as well as feet to ascend the steepest part of the rocks. The firing ceased now, for the sable assassin with our colour had disappeared, having concealed himself under some of the luxuriant masses of foliage, or in one of the clefts of the rock.
Breathless, bathed in perspiration by heat and excitement, I struggled up the flinty bluff, grasping the wild vines, creepers, and yellow gourds, that matted all its front; filled with ardour by the opportunity afforded me for distinguishing myself in the face of the whole brigade, which was now halted on the road below, inspired by emulation to maintain the distance I had already placed between myself and the other pursuers; and not without some dread the while, of seeing the bronze-like form of the giant negro appear suddenly above me, brandishing his reeking sabre, against which, in an arm so powerful, I could have offered but a meagre opposition.
I was close to the summit of the rocks, and already had my hands on the projecting roots of the nodding palm-trees that fringed the summit, when, on chancing to look back, I saw the negro with the standard, crouching behind a mass of basaltic rock, on a little plateau, some twenty feet or so below me. His sharp crooked sabre was in his hand; his glossy black eyes were fixed upon me with a bloodshot and upward glare, and in his face there shone a grin of triumph.
I almost laughed on finding the sanguinary wretch so completely in my power. Placing my heels firmly upon the strong branch of a gourd creeper, with my back against the wall of rock up which I had been clambering, I cast about my musket, looked carefully to the priming, cocked, and just as he was in the act of springing at me, sabre in hand, I fired!
With a bound into the air he fell on his back, with the flag below him, and beating the earth wildly with his bare heels, while blowing blood and foam from his mouth together.
A clamour from the regiment rose upward, as I fixed my bayonet and descended to where the fallen assassin—a gigantic Angola savage, formed like a Hercules, and dark as if hewn from the blackest marble—was lying. I approached cautiously, and not without fear that he might yet rise and spring upon me, even when in the throes of death, for I knew well how subtle these people were. After an irresolute and anxious pause of nearly a minute, I passed my bayonet through his body, which was then lying still and motionless. I thought it shuddered, and I am certain that I also shuddered, when thrusting him over the precipice into a black chasm, where a mountain torrent rushed towards the Cul de Sac Royal.
On picking up his weapon, it proved to be a beautiful French sabre, the hilt of which was covered with elaborate silver ornaments. Among these I perceived a coronet, and on the blade the name of "Louis de Mazancy;" and then a pang shot through my breast, for this sword had evidently belonged to the father of Eulalie, and was a relic of her family.
Descending the rocks, I rejoined the still halted regiment, and placed the blue silk standard, heavy with its embroidered thistles, the cross of St. Andrew, and the trophies of "Quebec" and "Belle-Isle," in the hands of the earl, who stood with a group of officers around the mutilated body of Glenluce, who was now cold, pale, and dead.
"You are a noble fellow, Ellis," said he, "and have bravely won the hundred guineas. I would rather have lost a thousand than one of my colours."
I reddened deeply, and, while panting with exertion, replied,—