“Try not to hinder me, Sir Squire,” replied Katherine; “I will go seek for my father. I have already seen enow of those grim and ghastly faces not to fear in such a cause.”
“Then shall I go with thee, Katherine,” cried Sang, seeing her determination. “Here, lean upon mine arm.”
When they came into the thickest part of the field of slaughter, Katherine shuddered and shrank as they moved aside, from time to time, to shun the heaps of slain. Sang looked everywhere for his comrade Roger Riddel, and at last happily met him; but, alas! Riddel could give no intelligence of him they sought for. By this time they had approached the abattis of dead bodies which had been so hastily piled up for defence against the expected attack of the Bishop of Durham.
“Come not this way, Katherine,” cried Sang; “this rampart of the dead is horrible.”
Katherine’s heart was faint within her at the sight; she stopped and turned away, when, just at that moment, her ear caught the whining of a dog at a little distance.
“That voice was Oscar’s,” cried she eagerly. “Oh, let us hasten, my father may be there.”
They followed her steps with the lights, and there she beheld her father lying on the ground, grievously wounded, and half dead with want and loss of blood. Luckily for him, poor Oscar had been accidentally let out at the time that Sang and Riddel went forth to search among the slain, and having sought more industriously for his master than all the rest, he had discovered the unhappy Rory Spears built into the wall of the dead. Rory had fallen before the tremendous charge made by the English, when they burst through the line of entrenchment, [[468]]where he had fought like a lion himself, and inspired a something more than human courage into those around him. Having lost his basinet, he had received a severe cut on the head, besides many other wounds, which affected him not. But the thrust of a lance through his thigh was that which brought him to the ground; after which, he was nearly trampled to death by the rush of English foot and horsemen that poured over him. During the time that had passed since he was laid low, he had fainted repeatedly, and had been for hours insensible to his sufferings. Whilst lying in one of his mimic fits of death, he had been taken up by some of those who were employed in heaping the slain into a rampart, and who, having little leisure for minute examination, had made use of him as part of its materials. Fortunately his head was placed outwards, so that when he recovered he was enabled to breathe, and consequently was saved from suffocation. Oscar had no sooner found him than, seizing the neck of his haqueton with his teeth, he pulled him gently out upon the plain.
“My father, my dear father!” cried Katherine Spears, running to support him, and much affected by the sight of his wan visage, the paleness of which, together with his sunken eye, showed more ghastly from the blood that had run down in such profusion from his wound, that the very colour of his beard was changed, and the hairs of it matted together by it.
“What dost thou here, Kate?” demanded Rory, in a firmer voice than his appearance would have authorized the bystanders to have expected from him; “sure this be no place for a silly maiden like thee.”
“Oh, father, father,” cried Katherine, embracing him, and doing her best to assist Sang in raising him up by the shoulders; “the holy Virgin be praised that thou art yet alive.”