’Twas while I was listening to the champing horses that I heard my name whispered in the darkness beyond the open casement; I turned slowly, and the nearest of the soldier watchers began to edge his way toward my window.

“’Tis I—­Dick Jennifer,” whispered the voice without.  “Swing the casement a little wider and out with you.  Be swift about it, for God’s sake!”

“I am fair trapped,” I whispered back.  “Make off as you can.”

“And leave you behind?” So much I heard; and then came sounds of a struggle; the breath-catchings of two men locked in a strangler’s hold, a smothered oath or two, a fall on the turf under the window, followed by the soft thudding of fist blows.  I could bear it no longer.  The edging soldier had come within arm’s reach, and when I swung the casement a little wider, he laid a hand on my shoulder.

“In the name of the king!” he said; and this was all he had time or leave to say.  For at the summons I drove my fist against the point of his wagging jaw, to send him plunging among the dancers, and the recoil of the blow carried me clear of the window-seat with what a din and clamor of a hue and cry to speed the parting guest as you may figure for yourselves.

The alighting ground of the leap was the body of Dick’s late antagonist lying prone beneath the window ledge; but the lad himself was up and ready to catch me when I stumbled over the vanquished one.

“’Tis legs for it now,” he cried.  “Make for the avenue and the horses at the hitch-rail!”

At rising twenty a man may run fast and far; at rising forty he may still run far if the first hundred yards do not burst his bellows.  So when we had darted through the thin line of encircling horsemen and were flying down the broad avenue with all the troopers who had caught sight of us thundering at our heels, Dick was the pace-setter, whilst I made but a shifty second, gasping and panting and dying a thousand deaths in the effort to catch my second wind.

“Courage!” shouted Dick, flinging the word back over his shoulder as he ran.  “There is help ahead if we can live to reach the gate!”

But, luckily for me, the help was nearer at hand.  Half way down the box-bordered drive, when I was at my last gasp, the shrill yell of the border partizans rose from the shrubbery on the right, and a voice that I shall know and welcome in another world cried out: 

“Stiddy, boys! stiddy till ye can see the whites o’ their eyes!  Now, then; give it to ’em hot and heavy!”

A haphazard banging of guns followed and the pursuit drew rein in some confusion, giving us time to reach the great gate and the horse-rail, and to loose and mount the gray and the sorrel we had marked out.

Whilst we were about this last, Ephraim Yeates came loping down the avenue and through the gate to vault into the saddle of the first horse he could lay hands on; and so it was that we three took the northward road in the silver starlight, with the pursuit now in order again and in full cry behind us.