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.
This thought gave him courage now.

He suddenly remembered the broken bayonet upon the ledge against the wall.