"Kirkpatrick, he is my prisoner, and I give him life." "You know not what you do," cried the old knight, struggling with Wallace to release his sword-arm.

"This is De Valence!" "Quarter!" reiterated the panting and hard-pressed earl.

"Noble Wallace, my life! For I am wounded." "Sooner take my own!" cried the determined Kirkpatrick, fixing his foot on the neck of the prostrate man, and trying to wrench his hand from the grasp of his commander.
"Shame!" cried Wallace; "you must strike through me to kill any wounded man I hear cry for quarter! Release the earl, for your own honor." "Our safety lies in his destruction!" cried Kirkpatrick, and, enraged at opposition, he thrust his commander (little expecting such an action) from off the body of the earl.

De Valence seized his advantage, and catching Kirkpatrick by the limb that pressed on him, overthrew him; and by a sudden spring, turning quickly on Wallace, struck his dagger into his side.

All this was done in an instant.
Wallace did not fall, but staggering, with the weapon sticking in the wound, he was so surprised by the baseness of the deed, he could not give the alarm till its perpetrator had disappeared.
The flying earl took his course through a narrow passage between the works, and proceeding swiftly toward the south, issued safely at one of the outer ballium gates--that part of the castle being now solitary, all the men having been drawn from the walls to the contest within--and thence he made his escape in a fisher's boat across the Clyde.
Meanwhile Wallace, having recovered himself, just as the Scots brought in lighted torches from the lower apartments of the tower, saw Sir Roger Kirkpatrick leaning sternly on his blood-dripping sword, and the young Edwin coming forward in garments too nearly the hue of his own.
Andrew Murray stood already by his side.