good opportunity for another call on my trumpet, and I
blew, without easing my speed. On the sound of it, one of the dark
figures in front swung round in saddle and fired, I saw the flash and
the light of it on his gorget and morion: and with that, the bullet
glancing against my mare's shoulder, she swerved wildly, leapt high,
and came down with forelegs planted, pitching me neck-and-crop out of
saddle upon the frozen road.

CHAPTER III.

Doubtless the fall stunned me; but doubtless also not for more than a
few seconds. For I awoke to the drum of distant hoofs, and before it
died clean away I had recovered sense enough to take its bearing in
the direction of Farnham. Strangely enough, towards Alton all was
quiet. Sitting up, with both hands pressing my head, for just a
moment I recognised the gallop for my own mare's. Another beat time
with it. I asked myself, why another? She would be heading for
home--wounded, perhaps--scared certainly. But why with a companion?
. . . Then, suddenly, I remembered the poor pack-beast; and as I
remembered him, all my faculties grew clouded.

Or so, at least, I must suppose; for of the sudden silence on the
Alton road I thought not at all. What next engaged me was a feeling
of surprise that, of my two hands pressed on my temples, the right
was cold, but the left, though it met the wind, unaccountably warm--
the wrist below it even deliciously, or so it felt until rubbing my
palms together I found them sticky, with blood.

The blood, I next discovered, was welling from a cut on my left
temple. Putting up my fingers, I felt the fresh flow running over a
crust of it frozen on my cheek; and wondered how I might stanch it.
I misdoubted my strength to find the lane again and creep down to the
river; and the river, moreover, would be frozen. For a certainty I
should freeze to death where I lay, and even more surely on the road
back to Farnham I must faint and drop and, dropping, be frozen.
With that, I remembered the light we had seen shining ahead of us as
we crossed the fields; and staggered along in search of it, after
first groping for my morion, which had rolled into the hedge some
paces away.

For a while, confused in my bearings, I sought on the wrong hand; but
by-and-by caught the twinkle of it through a gate to the left, and
studied it, leaning my arms on the bar. The house whence it shone
could not be any part of Holibourne village, but must stand somewhere
o