"A touch!" shouted the captains together, both too excited to have any thought for the law.
"An accident," gasped the proud priest. "A misfortune."
"Well, here's a touch!" called a deep English voice; and as the challenger made his nationality known he lunged beneath the abbé's blade, thrusting out until the blood spurted upward in a jet.
"Yes, yes. A touch—I confess," panted La Salle; and he staggered back, crossed his legs, and fell heavily.
"By St. Michael!" shouted the fat Laroche, furiously pulling out his sword and reaching towards the shadow under the cliff. "You shall pay, assassin, for this."
The mysterious stranger chuckled, disarmed Laroche in a moment, scratching the stout abbé's wrist with his point, and before the two officers and the handful of soldiers could bestir themselves, he had disappeared round the bend of the Rue des Pêcheurs. Roussilac ran to the ending of the way, but found no sign of the masked man, who had vanished as mysteriously as he had arrived.
CHAPTER III.
CHRISMATION.
The day following the duel La Salle was under the hands of the surgeon—who, in the ignorance of that age, treated his patient for loss of blood by letting yet more—and Roussilac was sending forth men with the charge to find the hiding-place of the Englishman, and to fail not at their peril. However, they did at that time fail. Not even the cunning hunchback Gaudriole had been able to discover the habitation of the mysterious swordsman who had dared to enter the fortress and openly defy its officers and men.