In spite of his protests, they began to carry him rapidly along. Miss Lydia was following them, in a terrible fright, when a gun was fired, and five or six other reports instantly responded. Miss Lydia screamed and Brandolaccio swore an oath, but he doubled his pace, and Colomba, imitating him, tore through the thicket without paying the slightest heed to the branches that slashed her face and tore her dress.
“Bend down, bend down, dear!” she called out to her companion. “You may be hit by some stray bullet!”
They had walked, or rather run, some five hundred paces in this fashion when Brandolaccio vowed he could go no further, and dropped on the ground, regardless of all Colomba’s exhortations and reproaches.
“Where is Miss Nevil?” was Orso’s one inquiry.
Terrified by the firing, checked at every step by the thick growth of the maquis, Miss Nevil had soon lost sight of the fugitives, and been left all alone in a state of the most cruel alarm.
“She has been left behind,” said Brandolaccio, “but she’ll not be lost—women always turn up again. Do listen to the row the Padre is making with your gun, Ors’ Anton’! Unluckily, it’s as black as pitch, and nobody takes much harm from being shot at in the dark.”
“Hush!” cried Colomba. “I hear a horse. We’re saved!”
Startled by the firing, a horse which had been wandering through the maquis, was really coming close up to them.
“Saved, indeed!” repeated Brandolaccio. It did not take the bandit more than an instant to rush up to the creature, catch hold of his mane, and with Colomba’s assistance, bridle him with a bit of knotted rope.
“Now we must warn the Padre,” he said. He whistled twice; another distant whistle answered the signal, and the loud voice of the Manton gun was hushed. Then Brandolaccio sprang on the horse’s back. Colomba lifted her brother up in front of the bandit, who held him close with one hand and managed his bridle with the other.