With some difficulty the guard brought himself up to the floor level.
“Step this way, and step lively,” said the pedlar. “Hold your hands out.”
He felt the touch of cold steel on his wrist, heard a click.
“Now the other hand.”
The moment he was manacled, the pedlar began a rapid search.
“Carry a gun, do you?” he sneered, as he drew a pistol from the man’s hip pocket. “Now sit down.”
In a few seconds the discomfited guard was bound and gagged. The pedlar, crawling to the entrance of the loft, looked out between a crevice in the boards. He was watching not the house, but the hedge through which he had climbed. Two other men had appeared there, and he grunted his satisfaction. Descending into the barn, he pulled away the ladder and let it fall on the floor, before he came out into the open and made a signal.
The second guard had made his way back by the shortest cut to the front of the house, passing through the garden and in through the kitchen door. He stopped to shoot the bolts, and the girl, coming into the kitchen, saw him.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked anxiously.
“I don’t know, miss.” He was looking at the kitchen windows: they were heavily barred. “My mate has just seen that pedlar go into the barn.”