Rupert lay with his face down on the stretcher, and felt himself carried upstairs, then along several long passages, then through a door, and felt the fresh evening air. Now by the sound he knew that he was being carried over the bridge across the moat to the burying ground. Then the stretcher was laid down.
"Now then, roll him over into the hole," one said, "and let us go back for the last. Peste! I am sick of this job, and shall need a bottle of eau de vie to put me straight again."
One side of the stretcher was lifted, and Rupert was rolled over. The fall was not deep, some three or four feet only, and he fell on a soft mass, whose nature he could well guess at. A minute later he heard the retreating footsteps of his gaolers, and leaping from the grave, stood a free man by its side.
He knew that he was not only free, but safe from any active pursuit, for he felt sure that the gaolers, when they returned with their last load, would throw it in and fill up the grave, and that no suspicion that it contained one short of the number would arise.
This in itself was an immense advantage to him, for on the escape of a prisoner from Loches--an event which had happened but once or twice in its records--a gun was fired and the whole country turned out in pursuit of the prisoner.
Rupert paused for two minutes before commencing his flight, and kneeling down, thanked God for his escape. Then he climbed the low ramparts, dropped beyond them, and struck across country. The exercise soon sent the blood dancing through his hands again, and by the morning he was thirty-five miles from Loches.
He had stopped once, a mile or two after starting, when he came to a stream. Into this he had waded, and had washed the muck stains from his clothes, hair, and face.
With the morning dawn his clothes were dry, and he presented to the eye an aspect similar to that which he wore when captured at Blois nearly a year before, of a dilapidated and broken-down soldier, for he had retained in prison the clothes he wore when captured; but they had become infinitely more dingy from the wear and tear of prison, and the soaking had destroyed all vestige of colour.
Presently he came to a mill by a stream.
"Hallo!" the miller said cheerily, from his door. "You seem to have been in the wars, friend."