ese vile guns he would himself have been a
soldier. You will not misunderstand me. I believe on my faith that
as a military man I was born out of my time. The scythed chariots of
Boadicea, for instance, must have been damned inconvenient; yet I can
conceive myself jumping 'em. But a stone, as I learnt in my
boyhood--a stone, sirs, and _a fortiori_ a bullet--"

"Hist!" broke in my father, at the same moment reining up.
"Prosper, what do you make of that noise, up yonder?"

I listened. "It sounds to me like a heavy cart--"

"Or a waggon. To my hearing there are two horses."

"And runaway ones, by the shouting."

We had reached a point of the road, not far from home, where a steep
lane cut across it: a track seldom used but scored with old ruts,
sunk between hedges full sixteen feet high, leading down from a back
gate of Constantine and a deserted lodge to a quay by the waterside.
Not once in three months, within my remembrance, did cart or waggon
pass along this lane, which indeed grew a fine crop of grass and
docks between the ruts.

"Nay," said my father, after a few seconds, "I gave you a false
alarm, gentlemen. The shouting, whatever it means, is over.
Your pardon, Mr. Fett, that I interrupted you."

"Sir," said Mr. Fett, stepping put him to reconnoitre the lane,
"I was but remarking what a number of the wise have observed before
me, that a stone which has left the hand is in the hands of the
dev--"

He ducked his head with a cry as a stone whizzed past him and within
a foot of it. On the instant the loud rattle and thunder of
cartwheels broke forth again, and now but a short distance up the
lane; also a voice almost as loudly vociferating; and, almost before
Mr. Fett could run back to us, a whole volley of stones flew hurtling
across the road.

"Hi, there! Halt!" My father struck spur and rode forward, in time
to catch at and check the leader of two horses slithering downhill
tandem-fashion before the weight of a heavy cart. "Confound you,
sir! What the devil d'you mean by flinging stones in this manner
across the middle of the King's highway."

The man--he was one of the seamen of the _Gauntlet_--stood up in the
cart upon a load of stones and grinned. In one hand he gripped the
reins, in the other a fistful of flints.

"Your honour's pardon," said he, lifting his forearm and drawing the
back of it across his dripping brow, "but the grey mare for'rad won't
pull, and the whip here won't rea