ion was divided between the slip
of paper, on which his eyes fixed themselves, and the attitude of his
comrades; he paid little heed to Count Hannibal, whom he knew to be
unarmed. Only when Tavannes seemed to ponder on his message, and to be
fain to delay, "Go on," he muttered with brutal frankness; "your time is
up!"

Tavannes started, the paper slipped from his fingers. Maudron saw a
chance of getting it without committing himself, and quick as the thought
leapt up in his mind he stooped, and grasped the paper, and would have
leapt back with it! But quick as he, and quicker, Tavannes too stooped,
gripped him by the waist, and with a prodigious effort, and a yell in
which all the man's stormy nature, restrained to a part during the last
few minutes, broke forth, he flung the ill-fated wretch head first
through the window.

The movement carried Tavannes himself--even while his victim's scream
rang through the chamber--into the embrasure. An instant he hung on the
verge; then, as the men, a moment thunderstruck, sprang forward to avenge
their comrade, he leapt out, jumping for the struggling body that had
struck the mud, and now lay in it face downwards.

He alighted on it, and drove it deep into the quaking slime; but he
himself bounded off right-handed. The peril was appalling, the
possibility untried, the chance one which only a doomed man would have
taken. But he reached the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a
precarious footing. He could not regain his balance, he could not even
for an instant stand upright on it. But from its support he leapt on
convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the
shoulder, he fell his length in the slough--but forward, with his
outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature. They sank, it is
true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward,
and freeing one by a last effort of strength--he could not free both,
and, as it was, half his face was submerged--he reached out another yard,
and gripped a balk of wood, which projected from the corner of the
building for the purpose of fending off the stream in flood-time.

The men at the window shrieked with rage as he slowly drew himself from
the slough, and stood from head to foot a pillar of mud. Shout as they
might, they had no firearms, and, crowded together in the narrow
embrasure, they could take no aim with their pikes. They could only look
on in furious impotence, f