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In an instant more it would have been torn from him, when, raising both his hands, he grasped the wolf's head and neck with all his strength, hugging him with an iron clutch to his shoulders. "On on!" he shouted to the almost paralysed driver. The courageous fellow still holding his fierce assailant in a death-gripe, the sleigh swept into the village.
And I had a soul; I had flung it away; I had set my will up for my destiny, and the one had worked out the other. But had I? When that devilish suggestion came to me on the bank, did I entertain it? Have I not said how I grasped at the great idea of a God, and held it with a death-gripe in the midst of assault? How did I come in the water? I did not plunge nor fall.
The moment he was conscious of the presence of something near him, he began to struggle more violently than ever. He threw his arms tight around my body, and hugged me in what I thought would be the death-gripe. Vainly I tried to shake him off. The more I labored, the closer he clung to me, as if fearful that I should escape his grasp. I believed that my last moment had come.
This man was promptly spitted upon the bayonet of a Federal sergeant and his death-gripe on the captain's throat loosened by a kick upon each wrist. When the captain had risen he was at the rear of his men, who had all passed over and around him and were thrusting fiercely at their more numerous but less coherent antagonists.
Take down the old muskets bent in the hot encounter, and printed with many a death-gripe; take down the old uniforms, clipped by Hessian sabres and torn by British bullets; take down the dusty muster-rolls, scrawled with those venerable names names that now "are graven on the stone," names that are buried in the sod, names that have gone up to immortality and ask, for what was this great struggle?
Unhappily the corporal, a brave fellow, believing that it was his duty to seize the supposed rebel, rushed forward, and began to mount the steps, presenting the point of his bayonet at Faithful; on which, no longer able to restrain herself, she sprang at his throat and gave him a death-gripe, hurling him down backwards a lifeless corpse, while his musket fell from his band.
After the first discharge of the musket and the twang of the bow, the struggle was maintained with knife and axe; the thrust of the former, or the descent of the keen and glittering tomahawk, being answered by sweeping and crushing blows of the musket's but, or by throttling grasps of hands that were clenched in the death-gripe.
A little later, when delight and a more tempered feeling permitted examination, a lock of human hair was discovered entangled in the teeth of the dog, and the following week the bodies of Baptiste and the peasant of Berne were found still clenched in the desperate death-gripe, washed upon the shores of Vaud. The moon is up; by Heaven a lovely eve!
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