The Premier, whom the drive and the near approach of danger had rendered alert and almost cheerful, nodded at Westerham in the darkness.
“All right,” he said, and his gnarled but still sinewy hand took a firm grip on Patmore's collar.
“You had better sit still,” he said, and Patmore cringed at the Premier's knees. His spirit was entirely broken by the agony he was now enduring.
The ray from one of the lamps outlined the shape of a gate.
“Here we are,” cried Westerham in a low voice, and in a second he had jumped forward and pulled the iron catch back and taken a stride forward. But his eager foot found no foothold. His hand was torn from its grasp of the gate, and he pitched forward, to find himself plunged up to the neck in icy water.
So great was the shock that he cried out a little as he spluttered and blew the water from his mouth. A couple of strokes brought him back to the gate again, and as he clutched it he looked up at the silent house.
Even as he did so he caught a little spit of flame from one of the windows and a bullet splashed into the water beside his head. There was another spit of flame, and he felt his knuckles tingle as though they had been rapped with a red-hot iron.
Then Mendip gripped him by the collar, and with his aid he scrambled up on to the path.
Lowther, who had been quick to see the necessity of instant action, was by this time firing back at the place from which the little spits of flame had come far above them. In the darkness he answered shot for shot.
After the sound of the shots came a complete silence, and Westerham, as he stood stock-still beside the gate, which was now swinging idly over the pond, could hear the patter of the water on the path as it dripped from his clothes.