“Stand behind me and shoot them down, governor,” cried Lester, dealing steady blows with the now broken chair, and trying to make his own body a shield for Mr. Denham.  The governor continued to fire on the convicts, who were pouring in a steady stream down the stairs from out of the room where I had seen the shower of dust, and through the ceiling of which, as it was afterward, proved, they had cut a hole, and so escaped from the upper corridor of the prison.

I tried to hold Ruth in my arms, for in her frenzy to reach her child she had flung up the window and endeavored to drop from it at the risk of her life.  “They will not dare to hurt her:  God will protect her innocent life,” was all I could say, when a random ball from below struck the window-frame, and, glancing off, stunned without wounding the wretched mother.  She fell, jarred by the shock, and I drew her as well as I could behind the door, on the other side of which lay the two bleeding prisoners who had tried to take her husband’s life.

Groans, shouts, curses, yells and pistol-shots sounded in the hall and on the stairs; only the back of the chair remained in Lester’s grasp, but heaps of men felled by its weight and crushed by their struggling fellows had tumbled down and been kicked over the broken balustrade to the hall below.

The guards had rallied from their surprise, and sparing the escaped for the sake of the precious shield they bore, turned their fire upon the escaping, cutting them off until the whole corridor below was blocked with wounded, dead and dying.  One more man appeared at the clerk’s door:  he was a powerful fellow with a horse-pistol and a stone-hammer.  Lester had staggered back from a flying iron bar aimed at his head by a villain he struck at without reaching, and who had bounded down the stairs to receive his death from the guard’s musket at the door.  The prisoner with the horse-pistol saw his advantage, and, cursing the governor in blasphemous rage, aimed at him as he fled.  Recovering himself, Lester struck for his arm, but not soon enough to stop the fire:  the charge reached its object, but not his heart, as it was meant to do.  It glanced aside, and Mr. Denham’s pistol dropped:  his right arm fell maimed at his side; but the field was clear, and Lester, catching the fallen pistol, went down the stairs over the bodies in a series of flying leaps.

“Where’s my wife?” exclaimed Mr. Denham, turning round dizzily and trying to steady his head with his uninjured hand.  “Tell her I’ve gone for Nellie;” and he made an effort to rush after Lester, but, reaching the top of the stairs, dropped suddenly upon a convict’s body stretched there by his own pistol.  Then I saw by the reddish hole in his trousers just below the knee that he had been wounded before, though he did not know it, and was now streaming with blood.

“Where’s Nell? where’s Edward?” asked Ruth, sitting up with a ghastly face, and looking at me in a bewildered stare.