le. This was too much for Abel.

"Wal, naow, yeou be a pooty chap to hev raound! A fellah's neck in a
slippernoose at one eend of a halter, 'n' a hors on th' full spring at t'
other eend!"

He looked at him from' head to foot as a naturalist inspects a new
specimen. His clothes had suffered in his fall, especially on the leg
which had been caught under the horse.

"Hullo! look o' there, naow! What's that 'ere stickin' aout o' y'r
boot?"

It was nothing but the handle of an ugly knife, which Abel instantly
relieved him of.

The party now took up the line of march for old Doctor Kittredge's house,
Abel carrying the pistol and knife, and Mr. Bernard walking in silence,
still half-stunned, holding the hay-fork, which Abel had thrust into his
hand. It was all a dream to him as yet. He remembered the horseman
riding at him, and his firing the pistol; but whether he was alive, and
these walls around him belonged to the village of Rockland, or whether he
had passed the dark river, and was in a suburb of the New Jerusalem, he
could not as yet have told.

They were in the street where the Doctor's house was situated.

"I guess I'll fire off one o' these here berrils," said Abel.

He fired.

Presently there was a noise of opening windows, and the nocturnal
head-dresses of Rockland flowered out of them like so many developments
of the Nightblooming Cereus. White cotton caps and red bandanna
handkerchiefs were the prevailing forms of efflorescence. The main point
was that the village was waked up. The old Doctor always waked easily,
from long habit, and was the first among those who looked out to see what
had happened.

"Why, Abel!" he called out, "what have you got there? and what 's all
this noise about?"

"We've ketched the Portagee!" Abel answered, as laconically as the hero
of Lake Erie, in his famous dispatch. "Go in there, you fellah!"

The prisoner was marched into the house, and the Doctor, who had
bewitched his clothes upon him in a way that would have been miraculous
in anybody but a physician, was down in presentable form as soon as if it
had been a child in a fit that he was sent for.

"Richard Veneer!" the Doctor exclaimed. "What is the meaning of all
this? Mr. Langdon, has anything happened to you?"

Mr. Bernard put his hand to his head.

"My mind is confused," he said. "I've had a fall.--Oh, yes!--wait a
minute and it will all come back to me."

"Sit down, sit down," the Doctor said.