My rifle a third time flashed in the pan; the priming had been wet with spray. I struck Warlock on the flanks, whirled him head on against Shemuel's murderer, and, whipping out my war-hatchet, aimed a furious blow at the fellow's head. The keen hatchet blade sank into the trooper's shoulder; he tumbled out of his stirrups and landed heavily among the cat-tails.
Instantly I checked Warlock, poised myself in my stirrups, and launched the hatchet straight at the other horseman, striking him full in the chest, but whether with blade-edge, handle, or flat, I know not, for, as his horse swerved wide, passing me at a tearing gallop, Mount and Foxcroft flew past, calling out that Shemuel was dead and that I must follow them for my life.
Up the shore we crashed through the rushes, driving straight out into the marsh, our horses floundering, and the light horsemen firing their pistols at us from the firmer ground above.
A ball grazed Warlock; his neck was wet with blood.
"They'll murder us all here!" cried Foxcroft; "charge them, in God's name!"
Mount heard him and bore to the left; I followed; knee to knee we lifted our crazed horses out of the marsh and hurled them into the little patrol of light horse, bursting upon them ere they could wheel to meet us.
In the moonlight their sabres flashed before our eyes, but no lunging point found its billet of flesh, though their blades rang out on our rifle-barrels; then we were on them, among them, plunging through them, and pounding away northward over a hard gravel road.
They discharged their pistols at us; a few of them followed us, but all pursuit ceased below Prospect Hill; we galloped, unmolested, into the old Charlestown and West Cambridge Road, and flew onward through the night.
In lonely stretches of road, which ran rivers of moonlight, I could see Mount riding, head on his breast, square jaw set, and I knew he was brooding on Shemuel's dismal end.
The swift murder of the little peddler shocked me terribly; Shemuel's strange premonition of his own approaching death fairly made me shiver in my stirrups as I rode. Like a doomed man the Jew had gone to his end, with what courage God had lent him. He had been a friend to me. For all his squalid weakness of limb, his natural fear of pain, his physical cowardice, he had not swerved from the service of his country, nor had he faltered or betrayed the confidence of men whose peril imperilled himself. Nothing save his fidelity to us had forced him to leave the city with us; nothing save the innate love of liberty in his grotesque and dirty body had lured this errant child of Israel to risk his life in bearing messages for those who watched the weighted hours creep on towards that bloody dawn already gathering under the edges of the sleeping world.