“We are pursued—­ride, now—­for your life, Mr. Colleton; it is three miles to the river, and our horses will serve us well.  They are chosen—­ply the spur, and follow close after me.”

Let us return to the village.  The situation of the jailer, Brooks, and of his companions, as the landlord left them, will be readily remembered by the reader.  It was not until the fugitives were fairly on the road, that the former, who had been pretty well stunned by the severe blow given him by Munro, recovered from his stupor; and he then laboured under the difficulty of freeing himself from the bag about his head and shoulders, and his incarceration in the dwelling of the pedler.

The blow had come nigh to sobering him, and his efforts, accordingly, were not without success.  He looked round in astonishment upon the condition of all things around him, ignorant of the individual who had wrested from him his charge, besides subjecting his scull to the heavy test which it had been so little able to resist or he to repel; and, almost ready to believe, from the equally prostrate condition of the pedler and his brother, that, in reality, the assailant by which he himself was overthrown was no other than the potent bottle-god of his brother’s familiar worship.

Such certainly would have been his impression but for the sack in which he had been enveloped, and the absence of his keys.  The blow, which he had not ceased to feel, might have been got by a drunken man in a thousand ways, and was no argument to show the presence of an enemy; but the sack, and the missing keys—­they brought instant conviction, and a rapidly increasing sobriety, which, as it duly increased his capacity for reflection, was only so much more unpleasant than his drunkenness.

But no time was to be lost, and the first movement—­having essayed, though ineffectually, to kick his stupid host and snoring brother-in-law into similar consciousness with himself—­was to rush headlong to the jail, where he soon realized all the apprehensions which assailed him when discovering the loss of his keys.  The prisoner was gone, and the riotous search which he soon commenced about the village collected a crowd whose clamors, not less than his own, had occasioned the uproar, which concluded the conference between Miss Colleton and Guy Rivers, as narrated in a previous chapter.

The mob, approaching the residence of Colonel Colleton, as a place which might probably have been resorted to by the fugitive, brought the noise more imperiously to the ears of Rivers, and compelled his departure.  He sallied forth, and in a little while ascertained the cause of the disorder.  By this time the dwelling of Colonel Colleton had undergone the closest scrutiny.  It was evident to the crowd, that, so far from harboring the youth, they were not conscious of the escape; but of this Rivers was not so certain.  He was satisfied in his own mind that the stern refusal of Edith to