Paul the Courageous

by Mabel Quiller-Couch

Paul quivered with impatience. "Quick! quick!" he groaned. "He may go up and murder mother or Stella while we are here." But the farmer had never been quick in his life, and did not know the meaning of the word.

"Plenty of time," he said, and Paul groaned with anguish. "Plenty of time, sir. That there lock'll keep un quiet for a brave bit, and I ain't going to trust myself in that place without plenty to back me up."

"I must go back alone, then," said Paul at last, in an agony of impatience; "I promised father I'd take care of them." And he began to descend the stairs, hoping by his departure to accelerate the movements of the others. But his hope was a forlorn one, and he went back by himself, in spite of the farmer's repeated injunctions to "wait a bit."

He hoped by being equally swift and silent to escape the notice of the thief again, but the man was no longer in the office. Whether he had succeeded in robbing the safe or not Paul did not know, but he soon gathered that he had gone upstairs; in fact, as Paul himself reached the landing, he heard him raise the latch of Stella's door and creep into the room.

"Who are you—what do you want?" gasped Paul. He was rendered well-nigh speechless at coming suddenly face to face with the burglar.

The man turned on him like a hunted animal at bay. "If you make a sound I'll shoot you!" he snarled, and with the same he whipped a revolver from his pocket. "If you'll hold your tongue and say nothing no harm'll come to anybody, but if you give the alarm I'll—"

But he did not complete his sentence, for their voices had wakened Stella, and at the sight of the stranger she started up in bed with a scream.

Frantic and desperate, the man turned from Paul to her. "Stop that noise, will you?" he hissed, "or I'll—" But at that moment Paul rushed past him, sprang on the bed, and placed his own body in front of his sister's. "No, you don't," he half sobbed, half screamed, "you—you coward, you'll hit me first!"

It is doubtful if the man would have fired at little Stella; probably he meant only to frighten the children, but at that instant he heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and with a frenzied look around him for a means of escape, he saw the doorway filled by the burly form of Farmer Minards.

Now Farmer Minards was not accustomed to the capturing of desperate men. A better man with a kicking horse, or a savage bull, could not perhaps, be found on Dartmoor, and if the convict had stood and allowed himself to be pinioned with only a moderate amount of struggling and kicking, the farmer's presence of mind would have been sufficient, but, as it was, when the man made one bold rush, with pistol cocked, for the very spot where he stood, he gave way before the rush; but for an instant there was a struggle and a fight, for Muggridge and the man who slept at the farm were close behind the farmer, little expecting their master to give way so soon, and leave them to grapple with their visitor, and it may have been that he intended to shoot down one of them, or that in the struggle the pistol accidentally went off, but in another second a bullet whistled through the air, and, passing clean through the fleshy part of Paul's arm, became embedded in the wall behind.