But while I screwed my courage to the sticking place and sought to hold it there, the pause became a keen-edged agony.  A glance aside—­a glance that cost a mightier effort than it takes to break a nightmare—­showed me the ensign standing ear a-cock, as one who listens.

What he heard I know not, for all the earth seemed hushed to silence waiting on his word.  But on the instant the early morning stillness of the forest crashed alive, and pandemonium was come.  A savage yell to set the very leaves a-tremble; a crackling volley from the underwood that left a heap of writhing, dying men where but now the firing squad had stood; then a headlong charge of rough-clad horsemen—­all this befell in less than any time the written words can measure.

I sensed it all but vaguely at the first, but when a passing horseman slashed me free I came alive, and life and all it meant to me was centered in a single fierce desire.  Falconnet had escaped the fusillade; was making swiftly for his horse, safe as yet from any touch of lead or steel.  So I might reach and pull him down, I cared no groat what followed after.

It was not so to be.  In the swift dash across the glade I went too near the shambles in the midst.  The corporal of the firing squad, a bearded Saxon giant, whose face, hideously distorted, will haunt me while I live, lay fairly in the way, his heels drumming in the death agony, and his great hands clutching at the empty air.

I leaped to clear him.  In the act the clutching hands laid hold of me and I was tripped and thrown upon the heap of dead and dying men, and could not free myself in time to stop the baronet.

I saw him gain his horse and mount; saw the flash of, his sword and the skilful parry that in a single parade warded death on either hand; saw him drive home the spurs and vanish among the trees, with his horse-holding trooper at his heels.

And then my rescuers, or else my newer captors, picked me up hastily; and I was hoisted behind the saddle of the nearest, and so was borne away in all the hue and cry of a most unsoldierly retreat.

XIII

IN WHICH A PILGRIMAGE BEGINS

As you have guessed before you turned this page, the men who charged so opportunely to cut me out of peril were my captors only in the saving sense.

Their overnight bivouac was not above a mile beyond the glade of ambushment.  It was in a little dell, cunningly hid; and the embers of the camp-fires were still alive when we of the horse came first to this agreed-on rallying point.

Here at this rendezvous in the forest’s heart I had my first sight of any fighting fragment of that undisciplined and yet unconquerable patriot home-guard that even in defeat proved too tough a morsel for British jaws to masticate.

They promised little to the eye of a trained soldier, these border levies.  In fancy I could see my old field-marshal,—­he was the father of all the martinets,—­turn up his nose and dismiss them with a contemptuous “Ach! mein Gott!” And, truly, there was little outward show among them of the sterling metal underneath.