instructions.  Just where the rock rose out of the swamp, Sergeant Terry’s squad entered, and easily wheeled round large trunks of trees resting on stone pivots, revealing a good waggon-track, the masked road.  This the cavalry occupied, looking to the priming of their pistols, and bringing their clubs into handy positions.  The Squire’s squad scaled the height near the road, and Mr. Terry’s took ground farther to the right.  The doctor led the way in front of and between the two sections.  The cavalry moved slowly, keeping pace with the climbers.  Soon the crest was reached, and the main body began to descend gradually, when the dominie slipped and his piece went off, the trigger having caught in his red window cord, startling the echoes.  Then came the diffusive boom and crackle of the blunderbuss, and the doctor, inwardly anathematizing Wilkinson, hurried his men on.  They heard axes at work, as if trees were being felled; it was the Captain and the Richards at the barrier.  No enemy appeared on the rocks, but pistol shots warned them that there was collision on the road, and the doctor called the second squad to wheel towards it.  The dominie, on the left of the first, saw what was going on below.  Revolvers were emptied and clubs brought into requisition.  He could not load his old muzzle-loading piece to save his life, but he knew single stick.  Two men were tackling the brave old colonel, while a third lay wounded at his horse’s feet.  The dominie sped down to the road like a chamois, and threw himself upon the man on the colonel’s right, the dissipated farmer.  He heard a shot, felt a sharp pain in his left arm, but with his right hit the holder of the pistol a skull cracker over the head, then fainted and fell to the ground.  His luckless muzzle-loader was never found.  The colonel had floored his antagonist on the left, and turned to behold the dominie’s pale face.  Leaving the command to the doctor, he dismounted and put a little old Bourbon out of a pocket flask into his lips, and then proceeded to bandage the wound.  Wilkinson had saved his life; he was a hero, a grand, cultivated, sympathetic, chivalrous man, whom the colonel loved as his own son.  When he came to, were not the very first words he uttered enquiries for Colonel Morton’s own safety?  Maguffin, having felled his man, held his master’s horse.

Squire Walker, Mr. Perrowne, and Bangs galloped on, the latter eager to seize Rawdon.  They and the infantry squads came almost simultaneously upon the select encampment, which was simply a large stone-mason’s yard, full of grindstones in every state of preparation, and bordered by half-a-dozen frame buildings, one of which, more pretentious than the others, was evidently the dwelling-place of the head of the concern.  Two simple-looking men in mason’s aprons stood in the doorway of another, having retired thither when they heard the sound of firing.  This was evidently the boarding-house of the workmen, and an object of interest to Ben Toner, who, with his friends