"Oh, don't!" exclaimed the girl.
"Wouldn't, if I'd got a stick. Listen; he's using an Army Webley, I think. Six shots. He's fired three. If I can draw the second three before he fills up, it gives us a start while he reloads."
On his knees, he peered through the bush.
"Still at the door," he said. "Breathe deep. On the third shot we go for the embankment. I'll get you up it. Then over the road. There's timber that side as well as this."
Again Amaryllis nodded, and Dick, rising a little higher, disposed the cap between two clumps of leaves, where he hoped it would seem supported by his head.
"Real G. A. Henty stunt, ain't it?" he said. "But I've shaken him up a bit, and it's worth trying."
He raised the cap slightly, let it drop back again on the rhododendron leaves, and laid himself full length on the ground.
"Third shot—if it comes. Breathe deep," he repeated.
There was a pause, agonizing to the girl; and then it came.
Three shots, thumping in rapid succession, the last of them depositing the cap almost in her hands. Clutching it, she scrambled to her feet, and Dick, catching her by the arm beneath the shoulder, forced her into a thirty yards' sprint, in which, while her heart beat as if it would burst, her feet seemed to touch the ground barely half a dozen times before the grey stones of the embankment rushed to meet them almost in the face.