with whom he had been engaged, left the combat to come to his master's assistance, little doubting that he had received a mortal wound. Both the villains immediately desisted from farther combat, and retreating into the thicket, mounted their horses, and went off at full speed after their companions. Mean time, Dixon had the satisfaction to find Mr Vere, not only alive but unwounded. He had overreached himself, and stumbled, it seemed, over the root of a tree in making too eager a blow at his antagonist. The despair he felt at his daughter's disappearance, was, in Dixon's phrase, such as would have melted the heart of a whinstane, and he was so much exhausted by his feelings, and the vain researches which he made to discover the track of the ravishers, that a considerable time elapsed ere he reached home, and communicated the alarm to his domestics.
All his conduct and gestures were those of a desperate man.
