CHAPTER XIX.
"Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold."—As You Like It.
When Marryott looked down from the oriel, he saw the horses huddled in a corner of the quadrangle. Rumney standing by the fountain, and several men about to swing the long piece of timber against the door a second time. Afar, at the gate by the road, as Hal could descry through the leafless trees, a mounted man kept watch. Master Rumney preferred to avoid witnesses, in his violation of the peace this Sunday morning.
Marryott flung open the casement, and leaned out, a pistol in each hand.
"Back!" he cried to the men with the branch. "Back, or two of you shall die!"
The men stopped short, looked up at him, and stood hesitating.
"Batter down the door!" shouted Rumney to the men. "I'll look to this cock!"
And he raised a pistol and fired at Hal. The ball sang past him and found lodgment in the wall of the gallery. The men sprang forward with the tree-branch. True to his threat, Hal let off both his pistols. Two men fell,—one struck in the shoulder, the other in the thigh. One howled, the other stared up at Hal in a kind of silent amazement.
With a wrathful curse, Rumney fired a second pistol at Marryott. But Hal, having now to reload his weapons, had disappeared in good time. Moreover. Rumney's aim was bad, for the fact that his better arm, wounded the previous day, was now bound up and useless. Handing his pistols to two men, for reloading, and grasping from one of these men a weapon already loaded, the robber fiercely ordered his rascals to resume the assault upon the door. They obeyed. The door quivered at their blow; but its bars and braces held. As the men were rushing forward for a third stroke with their improvised ram, flame and smoke suddenly belched forth from the windows nearest the door, and two more fellows sank to the snow. Kit Bottle and one of Hal's wounded followers had fired through holes they had made in the glass.