pened; for before the echoes of that pistol-shot
had died on the keen morning air, I thought I heard a noise of distant
shouting, and looked about to see whence it could come. Elzevir looked
round too, but Maskew forgetting to upbraid me for making him miss his
aim, still kept his face turned up towards the cliff. Then the voices
came nearer, and there was a mingled sound as of men shouting to one
another, and gathering in from different places. 'Twas from the cliff-top
that the voices came, and thither Elzevir and I looked up, and there too
Maskew kept his eyes fixed. And in a moment there were a score of men
stood on the cliff's edge high above our heads. The sky behind them was
pink flushed with the keenest light of the young day, and they stood out
against it sharp cut and black as the silhouette of my mother that used
to hang up by the parlour chimney. They were soldiers, and I knew the
tall mitre-caps of the 13th, and saw the shafts of light from the sunrise
come flashing round their bodies, and glance off the barrels of their
matchlocks.

I knew it all now; it was the Posse who had lain in ambush. Elzevir saw
it too, and then all shouted at once. 'Yield at the King's command: you
are our prisoners!' calls the voice of one of those black silhouettes,
far up on the cliff-top.

'We are lost,' cries Elzevir; 'it is the Posse; but if we die, this
traitor shall go before us,' and he makes towards Maskew to brain him
with the pistol.

'Shoot, shoot, in the Devil's name,' screams Maskew, 'or I am a
dead man.'

Then there came a flash of fire along the black line of silhouettes,
with a crackle like a near peal of thunder, and a fut, fut, fut, of
bullets in the turf. And before Elzevir could get at him, Maskew had
fallen over on the sward with a groan, and with a little red hole in the
middle of his forehead.

'Run for the cliff-side,' cried Elzevir to me; 'get close in, and they
cannot touch thee,' and he made for the chalk wall. But I had fallen on
my knees like a bullock felled by a pole-axe, and had a scorching pain in
my left foot. Elzevir looked back. 'What, have they hit thee too?' he
said, and ran and picked me up like a child. And then there is another
flash and fut, fut, in the turf; but the shots find no billet this time,
and we are lying close against the cliff, panting but safe.

CHAPTER 10

THE ESCAPE

... How fearful
And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!
... Ill look no m