quick of eye, swift of foot, and fearless. But what could fearlessness
avail him in this strait? With the best of rifles he would have felt
himself at a disadvantage. He was certain his time had come; and with
that conviction upon him, the terror of the thing and the horrible
physical shrinking almost passed away from him. The disease, eating away
his life, had diminished that revolt against death which is in the
healthy flesh of every man. He was levying upon the vital forces
remaining in him, which, distributed naturally, might cover a year or so,
to give him here and now a few moments of unnatural strength for the
completion of a hopeless struggle.

It was also as if two brains in him were working: one busy with all the
chances and details of his wild contest, the other with the events of his
life.

Pictures flashed before him. Some having to do with the earliest days of
his childhood; some with fighting on the Danube, before he left the army,
impoverished and ashamed; some with idle hours in the North Tower in
Stavely Castle; and one with the day he and his sister left the old
castle, never to return, and looked back upon it from the top of
Farcalladen Moor, waving a "God bless you" to it. The thought of his
sister filled him with a desire, a pitiful desire to live.

Just then another picture flashed before his eyes. It was he himself,
riding the mad stallion, Bolingbroke, the first year he followed the
hounds: how the brute tried to smash his leg against a stone wall; how it
reared until it almost toppled over and backwards; how it jibbed at a
gate, and nearly dashed its own brains out against a tree; and how, after
an hour's hard fighting, he made it take the stiffest fence and water-
course in the county.