Fearful of exposing my comrade to the peril of a hand-to-hand tussle with such a ruffian in the circumscribed area of the attic, I called Williams to the trap-door, and placing a cartridge in my Snider, I handed it to him. Then mounting the table, I thrust my head through the trap and held the candle. My blood was now up, and I determined to order the rascal to be shot if he refused to obey my commands.
‘Surrender, in the Queen’s name!’ I shouted.
There was no response; but the click of the lock of Williams’s rifle as he placed the hammer at full cock, must have been distinctly audible to the runaway.
‘If you don’t come out before I count five, you are a dead man.—One—two—three!’
‘Stop! For mercy’s sake, give me a chance!’ now pleaded the wretch in a husky whisper.
‘First throw your knife this way, and then come out.’
The villain tossed his knife to Williams, who threw it behind him to the other extremity of the attic; then leaving his retreat, he crawled towards us, and I was surprised to see by the dim light of the candle that he was attired in plain clothes. When he got near us, we were astonished beyond measure to find that he was not the man of whom we had been in search, but Scales’s companion the deserter, who had been suspected of rifling the officer’s room!
‘I own I took the things,’ confessed the man doggedly, seemingly anxious to make a clean breast of it; ‘but Scales helped me, and old Nathan put us both on the job’——
‘Scales has been here,’ I interrupted. ‘You may as well tell me what you know about him; it will be the better for you.’
‘Yes,’ replied the deserter, when he had dropped through the trap on the floor; ‘I got off his handcuffs, and here they are;’ scattering a heap of bones and displaying the ‘bracelets,’ each receptacle for the wrists being filed in two.