to send him plunging among the dancers, and the recoil
of the blow carried me clear of the window-seat with what a din and
clamor of a hue and cry to speed the parting guest as you may figure for
yourselves.

The alighting ground of the leap was the body of Dick's late antagonist
lying prone beneath the window ledge; but the lad himself was up and
ready to catch me when I stumbled over the vanquished one.

"'Tis legs for it now," he cried. "Make for the avenue and the horses at
the hitch-rail!"

At rising twenty a man may run fast and far; at rising forty he may
still run far if the first hundred yards do not burst his bellows. So
when we had darted through the thin line of encircling horsemen and were
flying down the broad avenue with all the troopers who had caught sight
of us thundering at our heels, Dick was the pace-setter, whilst I made
but a shifty second, gasping and panting and dying a thousand deaths in
the effort to catch my second wind.

"Courage!" shouted Dick, flinging the word back over his shoulder as he
ran. "There is help ahead if we can live to reach the gate!"

But, luckily for me, the help was nearer at hand. Half way down the
box-bordered drive, when I was at my last gasp, the shrill yell of the
border partizans rose from the shrubbery on the right, and a voice that
I shall know and welcome in another world cried out:

"Stiddy, boys! stiddy till ye can see the whites o' their eyes! Now,
then; give it to 'em hot _and_ heavy!"

A haphazard banging of guns followed and the pursuit drew rein in some
confusion, giving us time to reach the great gate and the horse-rail,
and to loose and mount the gray and the sorrel we had marked out.

Whilst we were about this last, Ephraim Yeates came loping down the
avenue and through the gate to vault into the saddle of the first horse
he could lay hands on; and so it was that we three took the northward
road in the silver starlight, with the pursuit now in order again and in
full cry behind us.

'Twas not until we had safely run the gantlet of the vedette lines by a
by-path known to the old hunter, and had shaken off the troopers that
were following, that I found time to ask what had become of the men who
had formed the ambush in the shrubbery.

The old man gave me his dry chuckle of a laugh.

"'Twas the same old roose de geer, as the down-country Frenchers 'u'd
say. I stole the drunken sergeant's gun and two others, and let 'em off
one to a time. As f