"Wallace! Wallace!" cried the stentorian lungs of Kirkpatrick. In a moment Wallace was at his side, and found him wrestling with two men. The light of a single lamp, suspended from the rafters, fell direct upon the combatants. A dagger was pointed at the life of the old knight, but Wallace laid the holder of it dead across the body of his intended victim, and catching the other assailant by the throat, threw him prostrate to the ground.
"Spare me, for the honor of knighthood!" cried the conquered.
"For my honor you shall die!" cried Kirkpatrick. His sword was already at the heart of the Englishman. Wallace beat it back. "Kirkpatrick, he is my prisoner, and I give him life."
"You know not what you do," cried the old knight, struggling with
Wallace to release his sword-arm. "This is De Valence!"
"Quarter!" reiterated the panting and hard-pressed earl. "Noble
Wallace, my life! For I am wounded."
"Sooner take my own!" cried the determined Kirkpatrick, fixing his foot on the neck of the prostrate man, and trying to wrench his hand from the grasp of his commander.
"Shame!" cried Wallace; "you must strike through me to kill any wounded man I hear cry for quarter! Release the earl, for your own honor."
"Our safety lies in his destruction!" cried Kirkpatrick, and, enraged at opposition, he thrust his commander (little expecting such an action) from off the body of the earl. De Valence seized his advantage, and catching Kirkpatrick by the limb that pressed on him, overthrew him; and by a sudden spring, turning quickly on Wallace, struck his dagger into his side. All this was done in an instant. Wallace did not fall, but staggering, with the weapon sticking in the wound, he was so surprised by the baseness of the deed, he could not give the alarm till its perpetrator had disappeared.
The flying earl took his course through a narrow passage between the works, and proceeding swiftly toward the south, issued safely at one of the outer ballium gates—that part of the castle being now solitary, all the men having been drawn from the walls to the contest within—and thence he made his escape in a fisher's boat across the Clyde.
Meanwhile Wallace, having recovered himself, just as the Scots brought in lighted torches from the lower apartments of the tower, saw Sir Roger Kirkpatrick leaning sternly on his blood-dripping sword, and the young Edwin coming forward in garments too nearly the hue of his own. Andrew Murray stood already by his side. Wallace's hand was upon the hilt of the dagger which the ungrateful De Valence had left in his breast. "You are wounded! you are slain!" cried Murray in a voice of consternation. Edwin stood motionless with horror.