A crack of a rifle admonished the land baron that the jest might have cost him dear.
CHAPTER XIV
THE ATTACK ON THE MANOR
After this brief hostile outbreak in the garden below the right wing, Mauville prepared to make as effective defense as lay in his power and looked around for his aid, the driver of the coach. But that quaking individual had taken advantage of the excitement to disappear. Upon hearing the threats, followed by the singing of bullets, and doubting not the same treatment accorded the master would be meted out to the servant, the coachman’s fealty so oozed from him that he dropped his blunderbuss, groping his way through the long halls to the cellar, where he concealed himself in an out-of-the-way corner beneath a heap of potato sacks. In that vast subterranean place he congratulated himself he would escape with a whole skin, his only regret being certain unpaid wages which he considered as good as lost, together with the master who owed them.
Mauville, however, would have little regretted the disappearance of this poor-spirited aid, on the theory a craven follower is worse than none at all, had not this 173 discovery been followed quickly by the realization that the young girl, too, had availed herself of the opportunity while he was at the window and vanished.
“Why, the slippery jade’s gone!” he exclaimed, staring around the room, confounded for the moment. Then recovering himself, he hurriedly left the chamber, more apprehensive lest she should get out of the manor than that the tenants should get in.
“She can’t be far off,” he thought, pausing doubtfully in the hall.
For the moment he almost forgot the anti-renters and determined to find her at all hazard. He hastily traversed the upper hall, but was rewarded with no sight of her. He gazed down the stairs eagerly, with no better result; the front door was still closed, as he had left it. Evidently she had fled toward the rear of the house and made good her escape from one of the back or side entrances.