In another minute he was dragged sidewise and lowered on to the rock, a change he gladly welcomed, for the rope had hurt him intolerably, and seemed to compress his chest so that he could hardly breathe.
“Well, this is pleasant,” he thought, as he bit his lip with vexation. “The lads will have a good hunt for me, find nothing, and then go back and tell Lipscombe. He will lie on and off for an hour or two, and then go and report that I have deserted or gone off for a game, or some other pleasant thing. Oh, hang it all! this won’t do. I must escape somehow. I wish they’d take off this cloak.”
That seemed to be about the last thing his captors were disposed to do, for after he had been lying there in a most painfully uncomfortable position for quite an hour, every effort to obtain relief being met with a kick, save one, when he felt the cold ring of a pistol muzzle pressed against his neck under the cloak, he was lifted by the head and heels, some one else put an arm round him, and he was carried over some rugged ground, lifted up higher, and then his heart seemed to stand still, for he felt that he was going to be allowed to fall, and if allowed to fall it would be, he thought, from the top of the cliff.
The feeling was terrible, but the fall ridiculous, for it was a distance of a foot on to some straw. Then he felt straw thrown over him—a good heap—and directly after there was a jolting sensation, and he knew he was in a cart on a very rugged road. The sound of blows came dull upon his ear, and a faint hoarse “Go on!” And in spite of his pain, misery, and the ignorance he was in respecting his fate, Hilary Leigh began to laugh with all the light-heartedness of a lad, as he mentally said:
“Oh, this is too absurd! I’m in a donkey-cart, and the fellow who is driving can’t make the brute go.”
Chapter Eight.
Lieutenant Lipscombe lays down the Law.
“Say, lads, I’m getting tired of this here,” said Tom Tully, bringing himself to an anchor on a patch of sand; “I’m as hot as I am dry. Where’s our orsifer?”