"High doings, friend! I'm concerned for thee."

Van Dorn felt at the grip that he was overcome. He tried to reach for his knife, but his arms were enclosed in the unknown stranger's, who, having seized him from behind, sought to push him through the square window on the landing into the grass yard below, where the rain was falling and the lightning making brilliant play among the herbs and ferns.

As the kidnapper prepared himself to fall, with all his joints and muscles relaxed, the boy, Owen Daw, lying bloodthirstily along the limb of the old tulip-tree, aimed his musket, according to Van Dorn's instructions, at the forms contending there, and greedily pulled the trigger.

The Quaker's arms, as they enclosed Van Dorn, presented, upon the cuff of his coat, a large steel or metal button, and the ball from the tree, striking this, glanced, and entered Van Dorn's throat.

"Ayme Guay!" Van Dorn muttered, and was thrown out of the window to the earth, all limp and huddled together, till John Sorden bore him off, muttering,

"I loved him as I never loved A male."

The desperate party beneath the stairs at last broke open the back door there and rushed forth, only to receive handfuls of red pepper dust thrown by Miles Tindel, as he cried,

"Tackle 'em, Cap'n Van!"

They screamed with anguish, and rolled in the wet grass, and yet, with fears stronger than pain, sought the road in blindness, and some way to leave the town.

Young Owen O'Day, or Daw, crept down the tree, and, seeing Van Dorn in Sorden's arms at the wagon, contemptuously said, as he mounted his mule and vanished:

"I reckon he'll never discipline me no mo'."

Derrick Molleston, regretting the loss of his loping horse, bore out to the wagon an object he had found striving to escape from the veranda at the kitchen side, though with a gag in his mouth, and a skewer between his elbows and his back.

"See me, see me!" the negro kidnapper spoke, hoarsely. "He's mine an' Devil Jim Clark's. I tuk him."

"Why, it's Buck Ransom," Sorden said.

"An' I'm gwyn to sell him, too," the negro muttered, seizing the reins. "You see me now! Maybe he cheated us. Any way, he's tuk."

The old wagon started at a run through the driving rain, the black victim lying helpless on his back, and Van Dorn bleeding in Sorden's arms, who continued to moan,

"I loved him as I never loved A male!"

Van Dorn made several efforts to talk, and often coughed painfully, and finally, as they reached a lane gate, he articulated:'

"The Chancellor's?"

"Yes, dis is it," Derrick Molleston said. "See me, Cap'n Van. I's all heah."

As they advanced up a shady lane, fire from somewhere began to make a certain illumination in spite of the loud storm.