if to test their
strength. Thank God, they were substantial and close together! Nothing
lighter than a hatchet would have sufficed to remove any part of them.

The murderous hand was still tapping with the knife when I heard a
shout from the man Jerry, coming from the neighborhood of my father's
stone-shed in the back yard. The hand and knife disappeared instantly. I
went to the back door and put my ear to it, and listened.

Both men were now in the shed. I made the most desperate efforts to call
to mind what tools and other things were left in it which might be
used against me. But my agitation confused me. I could remember nothing
except my father's big stone-saw, which was far too heavy and unwieldy
to be used on the roof of the cottage. I was still puzzling my brains,
and making my head swim to no purpose, when I heard the men dragging
something out of the shed. At the same instant that the noise caught my
ear, the remembrance flashed across me like lightning of some beams of
wood which had lain in the shed for years past. I had hardly time to
feel certain that they were removing one of these beams before I heard
Shifty Dick say to Jerry.

"Which door?"

"The front," was the answer. "We've cracked it already; we'll have it
down now in no time."

Senses less sharpened by danger than mine would have understood but
too easily, from these words, that they were about to use the beam as a
battering-ram against the door. When that conviction overcame me, I lost
courage at last. I felt that the door must come down. No such barricade
as I had constructed could support it for more than a few minutes
against such shocks as it was now to receive.

"I can do no more to keep the house against them," I said to myself,
with my knees knocking together, and the tears at last beginning to wet
my cheeks. "I must trust to the night and the thick darkness, and save
my life by running for it while there is yet time."

I huddled on my cloak and hood, and had my hand on the bar of the back
door, when a piteous mew from the bedroom reminded me of the existence
of poor Pussy. I ran in, and huddled the creature up in my apron. Before
I was out in the passage again, the first shock from the beam fell on
the door.

The upper hinge gave way. The chairs and coal-scuttle, forming the top
of my barricade, were hurled, rattling, on to the floor, but the lower
hinge of the door, and the chest of drawers and the tool-chest still
kept their p