Patience urged her father to hurry on towards their house; but he hesitated.
"What think you is amiss, Johnnie Strings?" he inquired nervously, fidgeting from one foot to the other, while his terrified daughter tugged at his arm.
"Usual trouble, I guess," drawled the pedler. "Redcoats paradin' the streets, and gettin' sassy." Then turning to Dorothy, he said, "Had n't ye best let me take ye back, Mistress Dorothy?"
Before she could answer him a small body of soldiers issued from a side street near by. A wavering, yelling crowd of angered men swept forward to meet them; and the two girls and their escorts found themselves in the midst of a struggling, shouting mass, with here and there a horseman looming up, whose headgear, faintly outlined in the uncertain light, proved him to be a British dragoon.
Master Storms seized his daughter by the arm, and taking advantage of an opening he saw in the crowd, darted through and sped with the girl down a narrow alley. But the pedler, trying to follow with Dorothy, was baffled by a number of the combatants closing in around them.
He shouted lustily for them to make a passage for himself and his charge; but although he was known to many of them, rage, and the lust of battle, seemed to dull their ears to his voice.
In the midst of it all he was felled to the ground; and with no thought of tarrying to find out if he were hurt, Dorothy, seeing a small opening in the mass of men, dashed through it, with the intention of making her way back to the Hortons'.
She had gone only a short distance when her path was barred by several horsemen, who seemed to be the leaders of the troop. They had fought their way to a clearer space, and were looking back as though for their followers to join them.
"Devils—fools," panted one. "They deserve to be wiped out."
"Aye," said another. "If we might use our weapons as we liked, I, for one, would take pleasure in having a hand at that game."