The position of the young man was one to try the mettle of a hero. Lucius found himself, for the first time, confronted with serious danger, and that danger of a kind from which the boldest might shrink. The idea of possible assassination in a lonely inn, under the cover of darkness, and in a country where deeds of blood were too common to make it likely that there would be any strict search for his body, made a creeping sensation of horror thrill through the Englishman's frame. But the spirit of Lucius struggled against and overmastered the feeling of fear. He ejaculated a prayer to One who can see in darkness, and protect in danger, and braced himself with firm resolution to encounter the worst that might happen.
"They shall find me no easy victim, if it come to a struggle," said the young man to himself; "with God and a good cause I will not fear the villany of man."
There being no means of exit by the door, the captive naturally turned to the window. Like the rest of the building, the casement had been very roughly constructed, and had never been made to open. The dry-rot had, however, got into the wood, and the whole framework was much decayed.
"I think that this might give way under the strong wrench of the arm of a desperate man," muttered Lucius to himself; and he forthwith made an energetic attempt to force out some of the bars. A few violent shakes did the work, and the Englishman had soon broken away enough of the frame to make an aperture sufficiently wide to admit of the passage of his body. Gasping from the physical effort, Lucius paused to listen whether the noise which he had made had roused any of the inmates of the posada. The attic was not over the kitchen; apparently no one had heard him, for the dead silence was only broken by the wail of the wind.
Lucius leaned out of the window and glanced down, to judge if escape were practicable. The room was at the back side of the posada, and the casement opened on a waste bit of ground which, as far as could be seen in the dim light, appeared to be a mere receptacle for rubbish, and not fenced in by any paling or wall. The height of the casement from the ground was not so considerable that an active man, holding by the window-sill, might not drop down without any very great risk of breaking a limb. Had the iron ring fixed in the wall been near enough to the window to have been available for a fastening, Lucius might have torn the sheet into strips, and by means of such an improvised rope have let himself down to the ground. But the ring was at the further corner of the room, and there were such difficulties in the way of making such a rope that Lucius dismissed from his mind a scheme which must have involved considerable delay, when every minute was precious.
The young man was cool enough to take every needful precaution to avoid crippling himself by a fall. The cloak, which would have impeded his motions, he flung out at the window, and the bedclothes followed, to lessen the chance of his spraining an ankle, or breaking a bone. His pistol the young man replaced in his belt; it must indeed add to the difficulty of passing through a narrow aperture, but Lucius would not leave so trusty a friend behind him.
"They will find the bird flown," said Lucius to himself, as, with as little noise as possible, he passed first one limb, and then another, through the hole in the broken frame. He had no small trouble in trying to avoid cutting himself with the fragments of glass which still, here and there, stuck in the wood. It was a work of time and difficulty to get his whole body free, while he retained a firm grasp on the sill. At last this task was effected; for an instant Lucius hung by his hands—then let go—and with a gasp of relief the late prisoner found himself safe on the ground.