Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/183

. 8, 1863.] drew back the hammers—and felt the nipples: the caps were gone! I tried the barrels: they were drenched with water. I saw it all: the pistol had been dealt with whilst I slept at the fire; and I was now utterly at the mercy of those fiends. But I had little time to waste in thought, for the next moment the door was shaken by a heavy hand. I lay back and moaned and snored like one in a troubled sleep.

“The door is bolted on the inside,” I heard the man whispering; “the fellow fastened it before he went to sleep.”

“Then burst it open,” said the woman.

“No,” was the rejoinder, “that would waken him up, and he might show fight. We must adopt some quieter course.”

“There’s the window,” she said;” cansaid; “can [sic] you not get in through that?”

“Quite right, lass: I had forgotten.”

I looked to the window: it was an aperture some two feet square or more, with a crazy sash of four panes, every one of which was broken. I crawled towards it and felt the sash: the hand of a child might have pulled it out. What was I to do? What chance of a struggle had I now? Faint and weary, with that broken arm, what resistance could I offer to this man of gigantic strength? Crushed by the prospect of my inevitable doom, I staggered back from the window and fell against a projection of the gable-wall. I thrust out my right hand to save me from sinking to the ground: it did not touch the projection, but stretched far into some hollow space. A pang of hope shot through my heart: here was a large open chimney like that at the other end of the cabin; and I felt the snow, which had fallen down through it, crackling under my feet. Could I escape through this? Was there still a chance of life? I stooped under and thrust up my head. The aperture was wide and deep, and the large stones of the rude masonry projected on every side. These were steps by which it was easy enough to climb. To think of all this, and to act upon my thought, occupied less time than I have taken to tell it. In spite of the helplessness of my left arm, and the excruciating pain I felt from it, I was up through the chimney and out on the roof before I heard the frail sash below forced in. To slide to the ground was easy enough; and, blessing God for my deliverance, I crawled round to the other end of the cabin, and from this starting-point I hurried away across the moor as fast as my feeble limbs could bear me. Looking back, I saw the glare of light from the open door of the cabin, and heard the shout of a fierce, angry voice. The snow-drift had almost ceased to fall, and the whitened ground gave out some faint light through the winter darkness. What I longed for now was some pit or hollow to creep into and burrow there till immediate danger was over. I was not long in finding one. I slid down into it, and with my right hand gathered the snow around me. Not ten minutes had I lain there when I heard a heavy footstep crunching the snow above. It was my pursuer, the intending assassin; and I could hear his muttered curses as he passed on. In a few moments more I heard him coming back again, and then all was silent and still as death. At length I crept out from my hiding-place, with cramped and aching limbs. I knew no more in what direction to turn now than I had known before I had entered that accursed cabin; but I struck right ahead, knowing that there must be a human habitation somewhere before me, should I only have strength enough to reach it.

I was fearfully exhausted, and I dragged my feeble limbs along as if they were weighted with lead. For a time the consciousness of danger, and the excitement of the fearful scene I had gone through, sustained me; but, by-and-by, strength and reason alike seemed to desert me, and I staggered along like one in the delirium of fever. How long this continued I cannot tell, for I made no count of time that terrible night; but I remember how, at last, in utter exhaustion, I fell prostrate on the snow.

As I lay there, unable to rise, and unable to move a limb, a long piercing shriek, the horrible import of which I know too well, rang in my ears. I looked up: that eye of fire was right before me. How can I tell you the horror of my situation?—a life’s agony compressed into the compass of one awful minute. The goods train, which always passes Longley about three o’clock in the morning, was coming, and I was lying helpless on the rails! With a cry of agony I tried to rise, but I fell back in utter exhaustion. Even the terror of approaching death did not give me energy enough to crawl from where I lay. But my mind was active enough for the one thought: to stretch myself out with my head towards the engine,—my only chance of safety. Commending my soul to God, I lay prostrate and closed my eyes. The next instant the shriek of the engine, loud and terrific, blended with the rattle of the carriages and the grinding sound of the wheels upon the snow that covered the rails, and then—and then I looked up to heaven, with a feeble laugh of speechless gratitude; and all danger was over. The train had passed along the other line of rails, not over those between which I lay: the snow had prevented me from distinguishing the one from the other; but had I had strength enough to crawl in the direction I had intended, the engine and carriages would have inevitably passed ever me, and left me there a mangled corpse. It was my utter weakness which saved my life. The joy of my delivery from a horrible death was followed by a natural reaction. I sank back in a swoon; and, when consciousness came back to me again, I found myself, weak and wasted, in my own bed-room, and in my own bed, where (they told me) I had lain for eleven days in raging fever. It seems that, in the morning, one of the railway porters found me lying insensible in the snow; and thus I was, a third time within a dozen hours, saved from death. But this bald pate was the price I paid.

“But the bag of gold?”—

Was found suspended from my neck, and, with the letter found in my pocket, was delivered in the proper quarter.

“And the intending assassins?”

I know nothing of them. They did not belong to that part of the country. They had disappeared