d up and thought. There was another man who had met him in the
village and had guided him to the inn; there was still a third who had
gone out of the kitchen as Wogan had entered it; there was the wife,
too, who might be awake.

Wogan crossed to the window and looked out. The window was perhaps
twenty feet from the ground, but the stanchion was three feet below the
window. He quickly put on his clothes, slipped the letter from under his
pillow into a pocket, strapped his saddle-bag and lowered it from the
window by a blanket. He had already one leg on the sill when a
convulsive movement of the man on the bed made him stop. He climbed back
into the room, drew the knife out of the board and out of the hand
pinned to the board, and making a bandage wrapped the wound up.

"You must lie there till morning, my friend," Wogan whispered in his
ear, "but here's a thing to console you. I have found a name for your
inn; I have painted the device upon your sign-board. The 'Inn of the
Five Red Fingers.' There's never a passer-by but will stop to inquire
the reason of so conspicuous a sign;" and Wogan climbed out of the
window, lowered himself till he hung at the full length of his arms from
the stanchion, and dropped on the ground. He picked up his saddle-bag
and crept round the house to the stable. The door needed only a push to
open it. In the hay-loft above he heard a man snoring. Mr. Wogan did not
think it worth while to disturb him. He saddled his horse, walked it out
into the yard, mounted, and rode quietly away.

He had escaped, but without much credit to himself.

"There was no key in the door," he thought. "I should have noticed it.
Misset, the man of resources, would have tilted a chair backwards
against that door with its top bar wedged beneath the door handle."
Certainly Wogan needed Misset if he was to succeed in his endeavour. He
was sunk in humiliation; his very promise to rescue the Princess shrank
from its grandeur and became a mere piece of impertinence. But he still
had his letter in his pocket, and in time that served to enhearten him.
Only two more days, he thought. On the third night he would sleep in
Schlestadt.

CHAPTER VI

The next afternoon Wogan came to the town of Ulm.

"Gaydon," he said to himself as he watched its towers and the smoke
curling upwards from its chimneys, "would go no further to-day with this
letter in his pocket. Gaydon--the cautious Gaydon--would sleep in this
town and in