'Halt, dog and scoundrel!—halt, or die!' he cried again and again.
Guebhard was now about a hundred yards ahead, but that distance lessened fast as Cecil tore after him, his pistol levelled twenty times ere he would risk a shot, as there was no time for reloading, and the night-clouds were deepening fast.
They were in full race—pursuer and pursued. Cecil fired two chambers; but both must have missed, as Guebhard neither winced nor fell, but fired at random in return.
'The fiend take him!' was the latter's thought; 'he baulked my night's work once, and slew my Montenegrin comrade, and I have already missed him, shot after shot!'
Without other thought than flight, Guebhard, aware that he was unable to defend himself now that his pistols were empty, and knowing that his personal strength and skill with the sword were inferior to those of Cecil's, spurred wildly on and on, with every respiration tasting all the bitterness of anticipated death in his coward heart, expecting every instant to feel a shot pierce his back like a red-hot bolt and stretch him there to feed the wolves and carrion crows.
Guebhard, perhaps, was not quite a coward by nature; but somehow the panic of an utter poltroon possessed him now. Was it the terrible deed he had done at the chapel of Krall Lazar that unnerved his heart and unstrung his sinews? It must have been so. The last glance he had seen in the eyes of Margarita haunted him; and he thought of that delicate and faultless form lying mangled at the foot of the cliff to become the prey of vultures and wild animals now, when his own end seemed so terribly close and nigh, at the hands of her avenger—the man he had so often wantonly wronged, and who, he knew, would be pitiless as a famished tiger.
If he had remorse, it was curiously mingled with an emotion of jealous triumph, that to this man Margarita was lost for ever—wrested from him by his hands, as we have said, and that Death alone was her possessor now!
'Coward, rein up!—your sword—your sword to mine!' cried Cecil, more than once; but neither taunt, sneer, nor threat availed him then.
At this time he felt in his heart much of that emotion which a writer calls 'the religion of revenge, which had been sacred to his forefathers, in the age when murderers were proven by bier-right, and for wrong, the Fiery Cross of war was borne alight over moor and mountain.'
Fiercely, high and tumultuously, coursed the blood through his veins. Every muscle was strained, like those of a race-horse in the field, for he had an awful penalty to exact, and Guebhard knew well that he had a terrible debt to pay—one for which not even his life and the last drop of his blood would atone.