"Mrs. Tucker, some vile plot has been hatched to rob this house while your master is away. That pack doesn't hold finery as Fanny was at first led to believe, but it holds a man, and I have shot him."
With trembling hands and colourless lips Mrs. Tucker, with the help of her maids, cut away the oilcloth that bound the pack together, and disclosed the face of a short sturdy man, it was the face of the late coachman, Timothy Smith! With one voice they cried aloud as they saw it.
"Dead! Is he dead?" cried Patty, shuddering and covering her face with her hands. "Oh, Mrs. Tucker, and it is I who have killed him!"
A groan from the prostrate figure reassured the party as to the fatality of the adventure, and aroused in them a sense of the necessity of doing what they could to relieve the sufferings of their prostrate enemy.
The huddled-up position occupied by the man when in the pack made him, of course, a good target, and made it possible for a single shot to do much more mischief than it might have done in passing once through any single part of his body. It was, of course, a random shot, and entering the pack vertically as the man was crouching with his hands upon his knees, it passed through his right arm and left hand and lodged in his left knee, thus completely disabling him without touching a vital part.
With some difficulty they managed to get the wounded man on to a chair bedstead which they brought from the housekeeper's room for the purpose, and such "first aid" as Patty was able to render was quickly given.
"And now," said Patty, "the question is, who will ride Black Bess to the village and procure help, for we must have help for the wounded as well as aid against the ruffians who no doubt intend to raid the house to-night."
"Sam, miss?" questioned the housekeeper timidly. All her nerve seemed to have departed from her since the report of that shot had rung through the house, and there was Timothy Smith's face staring up at her. Usually a stout-hearted woman, all her courage had deserted her now.
"Yes," said Patty gravely, "I think we shall have to take Sam into our confidence, unless I go myself. Perhaps, Mrs. Tucker, I had better go myself. Sam is only a boy, and he might be tempted to tell the story to everybody he met, and if the thieves themselves get wind of what has happened we shall have small chance of ever catching them. Would you be afraid if I rode off at once?"
Without any false pride the young girl saw how much depended on her, and saw too the blanched faces of the two women as they looked in turn at each other at the thought of their sole protector vanishing.