the pistol flew out of Tipton's hand, and Tipton swung about with
something like a bellow, to face Mr. Nicholas Temple.

Well I knew him! And oddly enough at that time Riddle's words of long
ago came to me, "God help the woman you love or the man you fight." How
shall I describe him? He was thin even to seeming frailness,--yet it
was the frailness of the race-horse. The golden hair, sun-tanned, awry
across his forehead, the face the same thin and finely cut face of the
boy. The gray eyes held an anger that did not blaze; it was far more
dangerous than that. Colonel John Tipton looked, and as I live he
recoiled.

"If you touch him, I'll kill you," said Mr. Temple. Nor did he say it
angrily. I marked for the first time that he held a pistol in his slim
fingers. What Tipton might have done when he swung to his new bearings
is mere conjecture, for Colonel Sevier himself stepped up on the porch,
laid his hand on Temple's arm, and spoke to him in a low tone. What he
said we didn't hear. The astonishing thing was that neither of them for
the moment paid any attention to the infuriated man beside them. I saw
Nick's expression change. He smiled,--the smile the landlord had
described, the smile that made men and women willing to die for him.
After that Colonel Sevier stooped down and picked up the pistol from the
floor of the porch and handed it with a bow to Tipton, butt first.
Tipton took it, seemingly without knowing why, and at that instant a
negro boy came around the house, leading a horse. Sevier mounted it
without a protest from any one.

"I am ready to go with you, gentlemen," he said.

Colonel Tipton slipped his pistol back into his belt, stepped down from