“They shan’t take me unawares,” he thought, and then he hesitated as to whether he should give the alarm by firing his piece.
In an instant he had raised it and his finger was on the trigger, but he did not make its flash cut the darkness for a moment and its report run re-echoing along the cliffs.
“What for?” he said to himself; “bring the fellows here to laugh at me because I heard a rabbit on the move. I should never hear the last of it.”
He again grounded his piece, but very softly, and stood with his back to the sea, straining his eyes in the direction from whence the sound had come, but the stones that towered up were all blurred together into one black mass, and though he fancied several times over that he could make out the figure of a man half-hidden by some projection, he was fain to confess directly after that it was all fancy.
“But fancy or not,” he said to himself, “I don’t mean to be taken on the grand hop,”—and he did not stir from his position where he stood on the very edge of the cliff shelf, but kept on glancing to right and left along the stone path, and sweeping the slope in front.
Ten minutes passed like this—ten long-drawn intervals of time—and then the man threw up his rifle and stood ready, fully expecting an attack, certain now that there had been good reason for the dislodgement of the stone. For from high up on the top of one of the ranges of prison buildings a sound rang out which sent a thrill through the watcher’s nerves.
It was the alarm bell, which might mean the escape of prisoners or an attack from a deadly enemy; but it could not be the latter, for there was no reflection of a fire.
“Now for it!” muttered the man, with his finger on the trigger, prepared for the rush of a man or men, and he thought over the formula he must utter before he fired.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” he said softly, “but no one shall drive me over without getting something first. It’s that Ratcliff Highway chap at his games again. I wish they’d hang him or send him somewhere else.”
And he thought of a warder who had been disabled for life, and another who was absent twelve months, both from injuries inflicted by a savage brute whom all the men feared.