Here was the chance I had prayed for.  Tom Garget’s sword had clattered down beside me, and with it I sprang afoot and cut a whizzing circle by my doughty captain’s ear that made him cringe and gasp and all but tumble out upon me.  The bit of parchment fluttered down and in a trice I had it safe.

You may think small of me, if so you must, my dears, when I confess what followed after.  No man is braver than his opportunity, and I had little stomach for a fight with three unwounded men.  Hence it was narrowed now to a bold sortie for the horses, and this I made while yet the captain hung in air and sought his foothold.

With all my breathless haste it was not done too soon, nor soon enough.  When I had quickly freed a horse from the dead hand that held it tethered, and was making shift to climb into the saddle, they thronged upon me; the captain from his window, the others pouring hotly through the gaping doorway.

I made shift to get astride the horse, to prick the poor beast with the point of sword, and so to break away in some brief dash beneath the oaks.  But it was a chase soon ended.  As I remember, I was reeling in the saddle what time the foremost of them overtook me.  I held on grimly till the horse pursuing lapped the one I rode by head, by neck and presently by withers.  Then I turned and would be making frantic-feeble passes with the sword at the man upon his back.

It was my plotting captain who rode me thus to earth; and when I thrust he laughed and swore, and turned the blade aside with his bare hand.  Then, pressing closer, he struck me with his fist, and thereupon the night and all its happenings went blank as if the blow had been a cannon shot to crush my skull.

VIII

IN WHICH I TASTE THE QUALITY OF MERCY

Two ways there be to fetch a stunned man to his senses, as they will tell you who have seen the rack applied:  one is to slack the tension on the cracking joints and minister cordials to the victim; the other to give the straining winch a crueller twist.  It was not the gentler way my captors took, as you would guess; and when I came to know and see and feel again a pair of them were kicking me alive, and I was sore and aching from their buffetings.

How long a time came in between my futile dash for liberty and this harsh preface to their dragging of me back to the manor house, I could not tell.  It must have been an hour or more, for now a gibbous moon hung pale above the tree-tops, and all around were bivouac fires and horses tethered to show that in the interval a troop had come and camped.

The scene within the great fore-room of the house had been shifted, too.  A sentry was pacing back and forth before the door—­a Hessian grenadier by the size and shako of him; and when the two trooper bailiffs thrust me in, and I had winked and blinked my eyes accustomed to the candle-light, I saw the table had been swept of its bottles and glasses, and around it, sitting as in council, were some half-score officers of the British light-horse with their colonel at the head.