Gallegher stole off into a dark corner, and watched the scene until his eyesight became familiar with the position of the land.

Then with his eyes fixed fearfully on the swinging light of a lantern with which an officer was searching among the carriages, he groped his way between horses’ hoofs and behind the wheels of carriages to the cab which he had himself placed at the furthermost gate.  It was still there, and the horse, as he had left it, with its head turned toward the city.  Gallegher opened the big gate noiselessly, and worked nervously at the hitching strap.  The knot was covered with a thin coating of ice, and it was several minutes before he could loosen it.  But his teeth finally pulled it apart, and with the reins in his hands he sprang upon the wheel.  And as he stood so, a shock of fear ran down his back like an electric current, his breath left him, and he stood immovable, gazing with wide eyes into the darkness.

The officer with the lantern had suddenly loomed up from behind a carriage not fifty feet distant, and was standing perfectly still, with his lantern held over his head, peering so directly toward Gallegher that the boy felt that he must see him.  Gallegher stood with one foot on the hub of the wheel and with the other on the box waiting to spring.  It seemed a minute before either of them moved, and then the officer took a step forward, and demanded sternly, “Who is that?  What are you doing there?”

There was no time for parley then.  Gallegher felt that he had been taken in the act, and that his only chance lay in open flight.  He leaped up on the box, pulling out the whip as he did so, and with a quick sweep lashed the horse across the head and back.  The animal sprang forward with a snort, narrowly clearing the gate-post, and plunged off into the darkness.

“Stop!” cried the officer.

So many of Gallegher’s acquaintances among the ’longshoremen and mill hands had been challenged in so much the same manner that Gallegher knew what would probably follow if the challenge was disregarded.  So he slipped from his seat to the footboard below, and ducked his head.

The three reports of a pistol, which rang out briskly from behind him, proved that his early training had given him a valuable fund of useful miscellaneous knowledge.

“Don’t you be scared,” he said, reassuringly, to the horse; “he’s firing in the air.”

The pistol-shots were answered by the impatient clangor of a patrol-wagon’s gong, and glancing over his shoulder Gallegher saw its red and green lanterns tossing from side to side and looking in the darkness like the side-lights of a yacht plunging forward in a storm.

“I hadn’t bargained to race you against no patrol-wagons,” said Gallegher to his animal; “but if they want a race, we’ll give them a tough tussle for it, won’t we?”

Philadelphia, lying four miles to the south, sent up a faint yellow glow to the sky.  It seemed very far away, and Gallegher’s braggadocio grew cold within him at the loneliness of his adventure and the thought of the long ride before him.