He took hold of the leather thong, but found that it was fastened at the other end to the saddle.  This was too much for Abel.

“Wal, naow, yeou be a pooty chap to hev raound!  A fellah’s neck in a slippernoose at one eend of a halter, ‘n’ a boss on th’ full spring at t’other eend!”

He looked at him from head to foot as a naturalist inspects a new specimen.  His clothes had suffered in his fall, especially on the leg which had been caught under the horse.

“Hullo! look o’ there, naow!  What’s that ‘ere stickin’ aout o’ y’r boot?”

It was nothing but the handle of an ugly knife, which Abel instantly relieved him of.

The party now took up the line of march for old Doctor Kittredge’s house, Abel carrying the pistol and knife, and Mr. Bernard walking in silence, still half-stunned, holding the hay-fork, which Abel had thrust into his hand.  It was all a dream to him as yet.  He remembered the horseman riding at him, and his firing the pistol; but whether he was alive, and these walls around him belonged to the village of Rockland, or whether he had passed the dark river, and was in a suburb of the New Jerusalem, he could not as yet have told.

They were in the street where the Doctor’s house was situated.

“I guess I’ll fire off one o’ these here berrils,” said Abel.

He fired.

Presently there was a noise of opening windows, and the nocturnal headdresses of Rockland flowered out of them like so many developments of the Night-blooming Cereus.  White cotton caps and red bandanna handkerchiefs were the prevailing forms of efflorescence.  The main point was that the village was waked up.  The old Doctor always waked easily, from long habit, and was the first among those who looked out to see what had happened.

“Why, Abel!” he called out, “what have you got there? and what’s all this noise about?”

“We’ve ketched the Portagee!” Abel answered, as laconically as the hero of Lake Erie in his famous dispatch.  “Go in there, you fellah!”

The prisoner was marched into the house, and the Doctor, who had bewitched his clothes upon him in a way that would have been miraculous in anybody but a physician, was down in presentable form as soon as if it had been a child in a fit that he was sent for.

“Richard Venner!” the Doctor exclaimed.  “What is the meaning of all this?  Mr. Langdon, has anything happened to you?”

Mr. Bernard put his hand to his head.

“My mind is confused,” he said.  “I’ve had a fall.—­Oh, yes!—­wait a minute and it will all come back to me.”

“Sit down, sit down,” the Doctor said.  “Abel will tell me about it.  Slight concussion of the brain.  Can’t remember very well for an hour or two,—­will come right by to-morrow.”

“Been stunded,” Abel said.  “He can’t tell nothin’.”

Abel then proceeded to give a Napoleonic bulletin of the recent combat of cavalry and infantry and its results,—­none slain, one captured.