He fired.

Presently there was a noise of opening windows, and the nocturnal
headdresses of Rockland flowered out of them like so many developments
of the Night-blooming Cereus. White cotton caps and red bandanna
handkerchiefs were the prevailing forms of efflorescence. The main point
was that the village was waked up. The old Doctor always waked easily,
from long habit, and was the first among those who looked out to see
what had happened.

"Why, Abel!" he called out, "what have you got there? and what's all
this noise about?"

"We've ketched the Portagee!" Abel answered, as laconically as the hero
of Lake Erie in his famous dispatch. "Go in there, you fellah!"

The prisoner was marched into the house, and the Doctor, who had
bewitched his clothes upon him in a way that would have been miraculous
in anybody but a physician, was down in presentable form as soon as if
it had been a child in a fit that he was sent for.

"Richard Venner!" the Doctor exclaimed. "What is the meaning of all
this? Mr. Langdon, has anything happened to you?"

Mr. Bernard put his hand to his head.

"My mind is confused," he said. "I've had a fall.--Oh, yes!--wait a
minute and it will all come back to me."

"Sit down, sit down," the Doctor said. "Abel will tell me about it.
Slight concussion of the brain. Can't remember very well for an hour or
two,--will come right by to-morrow."

"Been stunded," Abel said. "He can't tell nothin'."

Abel then proceeded to give a Napoleonic bulletin of the recent combat
of cavalry and infantry and its results,--none slain, one captured.

The Doctor looked at the prisoner through his spectacles.

"What's the matter with your shoulder, Venner?"

Dick answered sullenly, that he didn't know,--fell on it when his horse
came down. The Doctor examined it as carefully as he could through his
clothes.

"Out of joint. Untie his hands, Abel."

By this time a small alarm had spread among the neighbors, and there was
a circle around Dick, who glared about on the assembled honest people
like a hawk with a broken wing.

When the Doctor said, "Untie his hands," the circle widened perceptibly.

"Isn't it a leetle rash to give him the use of his hands? I see there's
females and children standin' near."

This was the remark of our old friend, Deacon Soper, who retired from
the front row, as he spoke, behind a respectable-looking, but somewhat
hastily dressed person of the defenceless sex, the female help of