I stirred the dying embers, throwing on a pine knot for better light.  Then I took down my father’s sword from its deer-horn brackets over the chimney-piece, and set myself to fine its edge and point with a bit of Scotch whinstone.  It was a good blade; a true old Andrea Ferara got in battle in the seventeenth century by one of the Nottingham Iretons.

I whetted it well and carefully.  It was not that I feared my enemy’s strength of wrist or tricks of fence; but fighting had been my trade, and he is but a poor craftsman who looks not well to see that his tools are in order against their time of using.

II

WHICH KNITS UP SOME BROKEN ENDS

It was in the autumn of the year ’64, as I was coming of age, that my father made ready to send me to England.  Himself a conscience exile from Episcopal Virginia, and a descendant of those Nottingham Iretons whose best-known son fought stoutly against Church and King under Oliver Cromwell, he was yet willing to humor my bent and to use the interest of my mother’s family to enter me in the king’s service.

Accordingly, I took ship at Norfolk for “home,” as we called it in those days; and, after a stormy passage and overmuch waiting as my cousins’ guest in Lincolnshire, had my pair of colors in the Scots Blues, lately home from garrison duty in the Canadas.

Of the life in barracks of a young ensign with little wit and less wisdom, and with more guineas in his purse than was good for him, the less said the better.  But of this you may like to know that, what with a good father’s example, and some small heritage of Puritan decency come down to me from the sound-hearted old Roundhead stock, I won out of that devil’s sponging-house, an army in the time of peace, with somewhat less to my score than others had to theirs.

It was in this barrack life that I came to know Richard Coverdale and his evil genius, the man Francis Falconnet.  Coverdale was an ensign in my own regiment, and we were sworn friends from the first.  His was a clean soul and a brave; and it was to him that I owed escape from many of the grosser chargings on that score above-named.

As for Falconnet, he was even then a ruffler and a bully, though he was not of the army.  He was a younger son, and at that time there were two lives between him and the baronetcy; but with a mother’s bequeathings to purchase idleness and to gild his iniquities, he was a fair example of the jeunesse doree of that England; a libertine, a gamester, a rakehell; brave as the tiger is brave, and to the full as pitiless.  He was a boon companion of the officers’ mess; and for a time—­and purpose—­posed as Coverdale’s friend, and mine.

Since I would not tell my poor Dick’s story to Richard Jennifer, I may not set it down in cold words here for you.  It was the age-old tragic comedy of a false friend’s treachery and a woman’s weakness; a duel, and the wrong man slain.  And you may know this; that Falconnet’s most merciful role in it was the part he played one chill November morning when he put Richard Coverdale to the wall and ran him through.