where but now the firing squad had
stood; then a headlong charge of rough-clad horsemen--all this befell in
less than any time the written words can measure.

I sensed it all but vaguely at the first, but when a passing horseman
slashed me free I came alive, and life and all it meant to me was
centered in a single fierce desire. Falconnet had escaped the fusillade;
was making swiftly for his horse, safe as yet from any touch of lead or
steel. So I might reach and pull him down, I cared no groat what
followed after.

It was not so to be. In the swift dash across the glade I went too near
the shambles in the midst. The corporal of the firing squad, a bearded
Saxon giant, whose face, hideously distorted, will haunt me while I
live, lay fairly in the way, his heels drumming in the death agony, and
his great hands clutching at the empty air.

I leaped to clear him. In the act the clutching hands laid hold of me
and I was tripped and thrown upon the heap of dead and dying men, and
could not free myself in time to stop the baronet.

I saw him gain his horse and mount; saw the flash of, his sword and the
skilful parry that in a single parade warded death on either hand; saw
him drive home the spurs and vanish among the trees, with his
horse-holding trooper at his heels.

And then my rescuers, or else my newer captors, picked me up hastily;
and I was hoisted behind the saddle of the nearest, and so was borne
away in all the hue and cry of a most unsoldierly retreat.

XIII

IN WHICH A PILGRIMAGE BEGINS

As you have guessed before you turned this page, the men who charged so
opportunely to cut me out of peril were my captors only in the saving
sense.

Their overnight bivouac was not above a mile beyond the glade of
ambushment. It was in a little dell, cunningly hid; and the embers of
the camp-fires were still alive when we of the horse came first to this
agreed-on rallying point.

Here at this rendezvous in the forest's heart I had my first sight of
any fighting fragment of that undisciplined and yet unconquerable
patriot home-guard that even in defeat proved too tough a morsel for
British jaws to masticate.

They promised little to the eye of a trained soldier, these border
levies. In fancy I could see my old field-marshal,--he was the father of
all the martinets,--turn up his nose and dismiss them with a
contemptuous "_Ach! mein Gott!_" And, truly, there was little outward
show among them of the sterling