There was evidently a hot pursuit in the rear. Now and then the long halls reverberated with pistol shots, and a bullet buried itself in the door as Jack Bixby burst into the room. He stared aghast at his old comrade for an instant. Then as he heard the rapid footfalls, the jingle of spurs, the clamor of voices behind him, he ran to one of the windows. He drew back dismayed by the sight of the depths of the gorge below. He was caught as in a trap.
Hilary Knox could never account for the inspiration of that moment.
At right angles with the loftier main building a one-story wing jutted out, and the space within its gable roof and above its ceiling, which was on a level with the floor of the ball-room, was separated from that apartment only by a rude screen of boards.
Hilary burst one of these rough boards loose at the lower end, and held it back with the left hand spared him.
“Jump through, Jack!” he cried out to his old enemy. “Jump through the plaster o’ the ceilin’ right hyar. The counter in the bar-room down thar will break yer fall.”
Jack Bixby sprang through the dark aperture. There was a crash within as the plaster fell.
The next moment a bullet whizzed through Hilary’s hat, and the ball-room was astir with armed men; among them Hilary recognized other mountaineers, old friends and neighbors who had joined the “Loyal Tennesseans.”
“I never would hev thought ye would hev let Jack Bixby git past ye arter the way he treated ye,” one of them remarked, when the search had proved futile.
“Waal,” said Hilary, miserably, “I hain’t hed much grit nohows sence the surgeon took off my arm.”
His interlocutor looked curiously at the hole in the young fellow’s hat, pierced while he stood his ground that another man might escape. Hilary had no nice sense of discrimination. His idea of courage was the onslaught.