the mob was burning houses
everywhere and the soldiers firing on the rioters in every quarter of
London, seemed to bear a charmed life. He rode a great brewer's horse
and carried an ax, and wherever the fight was thickest there he was to
be found.

Never had such a sight been seen in London as when the prison gate fell
and the crowd rushed from cell to cell, smashing the iron doors to
release the prisoners, some of whom, being under sentence of death, had
never expected to be free again. Rudge, the murderer, knowing nothing of
what the uproar meant, suffered tortures, thinking in his guilty fear
that the hordes were howling for his life. When he was finally released
and in the open street he found Barnaby beside him.

They broke off their fetters, and that night took refuge in a shed in a
field. Next day Rudge sent Barnaby to try to find the blind man, his
cunning partner, in whose wits he trusted to help them get away. Barnaby
brought the blind man, and brought also Hugh, whom he found wounded in
the street, but in so doing he was seen by Dennis, the hangman.

This villainous sneak, knowing that the daring of the rioters had
reached its limit, and that they must soon be scattered and captured,
and thinking to buy pardon for himself by a piece of treachery, without
delay brought soldiers, who surrounded the shed. The blind man,
attempting to run away, was shot dead, and the others, Rudge, Hugh and
poor, innocent Barnaby, were captured.

Then, well satisfied with his work, Dennis set out for the house where
Simon Tappertit had confined Emma Haredale and Dolly Varden. The hangman
wanted them well out of the way, so they could not testify that he had
helped to burn The Warren and to kidnap them. He had thought of a plan
to have them taken to a boat in the river and conveyed where their
friends would never find them, and to carry them off he chose Gashford,
Lord George Gordon's secretary, who was the more willing as he had
fallen in love with Emma's beauty.

But this wicked plan was never to be carried out. The very hour that
Gashford came on this pitiless errand, while he roughly bade Emma
prepare to depart, the doors flew open. Men poured in, led by Edward
Chester, who knocked Gashford down; and in another moment Emma was
clasped in her uncle's embrace, and Dolly, laughing and crying at the
same time, fell into the arms of her father. Their place of concealment
had been discovered a few hours before, and the three m