Black Wat's eyes sparkled savagely.
"Sim Salkeld," said he, to a red-haired reiver, "yonder window will serve us while the smoke hides it; set a ladder cautiously and I'll up and in."
The window lit the living room in the second story, and was good five-and-twenty feet from the ground: under cover of the burning byre they lashed two ladders together, and followed their leader, while the rest engaged the attention of the little garrison by a bold attack on the main door.
A powerful, bearded man was Wat Armstrong, and his grasp was on the iron bars of the window when a shrill cry made him look upward.
"Help! Long John," screamed Jocelyn, peering over the parapet as the wind suddenly curled the smoke away and revealed the danger, and Black Wat closed his eyes involuntarily as a jagged rock came hurtling through the air.
It struck the second reiver standing on the rungs below him, and with a terrible yell the man fell backwards, dragging the ladder away to fall crashing into the blaze.
"Hold, boys," said Long John, checking the avalanche of missiles that was about to descend on the wretched man clinging to the iron bars, "this comes o' a man climbing above his station; how are ye feelin' now, Black Wat Armstrong?"
The two enemies glared into each other's eyes, and the reiver's reply was drowned in a cry of triumph from the Tower, and the clamour of dismay that rose from the moss-troopers below.
A man clad in half armour, with a steel basinet on his head, must needs pause before he drops twenty-five feet on to the hewn rock, but already his men were racing to the ricks and returning with huge armfuls of hay to break his fall.
"Father," cried Halbert, poising a slab of freestone that he had torn from the roof, "he'll be away in a trice!"