e incurred this fellow's enmity,
and it is clear that he will shrink at nothing to gratify it.
Moreover, I cannot consider my daughter to be in safety, as long as
so reckless a man as this is in the town. I will go at once to the
magistrates, and urge that my daughter goes in danger of him, and
so obtain an order to search for and arrest him. In a few hours we
will have him by the heels, and then, after a while in prison, we
will send him packing across the frontier, with a warning that if
he comes back he will not escape so lightly."

The search, however, was not successful; and Mynheer Von Duyk was
beginning to think that Rupert must have been mistaken, when the
officer of the magistracy discovered that a man answering to the
description given had been staying for three days at a small tavern
by the water, but that he had hastily taken a boat and sailed,
within a half hour of being seen by Rupert.

"It is a low resort where he was staying," Von Duyk said, "A tavern
to which all the bad characters of the town--for even Dort has some
bad characters--do resort. If he came here to do you harm, or with
any fresh design upon my daughter, he would find instruments there.
I had intended to have left Maria behind, when I travelled to the
Hague next week; but I will now take her with me, with two or three
stout fellows as an escort.

"As for you, friend Rupert, you have but two more evenings here in
Dort, but I pray you move not out after dusk, for these long wars
have made many men homeless and desperate, and it is not good for
one who has an enemy to trust himself abroad at night, alone."

The next morning Hugh went down to the quay with one of the clerks
of Von Duyk, and struck a bargain with some boatmen to carry Rupert
and himself to Bergen op Zoom. It was a craft of some four or five
tons burden, with a good sized cabin.

The next day Hugh went down early to the boat with the bans
containing Rupert's luggage and his own, and a servant of Von Duyk
accompanied him, bearing some provisions and a few choice bottles
of wine for their use on the way.

"Do you know, Master Rupert," he said on his return, "I don't much
like the look of that boatman chap. When we got down to the quay
this morning, he was talking with two men whose faces I did not
see, for they walked suddenly and hastily away, but who seemed to
me to flavour much of the two men we disturbed that evening when
they were carrying off Miss Von Duyk. I could no