" shouted Holmes.

Our hopes were rewarded by Harrigan the butler, who came running out
of a side entrance of the castle and made a flying leap at Budd from
the side, just as the latter passed him.

Harrigan seized the runner around the knees, and they both came with a
crash to the ground (making as fine a football tackle as I ever saw),
where they rolled and wrestled, the butler on top.

Holmes and I ran up to them, and we soon got a pair of
handcuffs,--which Holmes always carried with him,--around Budd's
wrists and jerked him to his feet, while Harrigan arose and brushed
off his clothes, just in time to meet the Earl, who hastened out of
the castle and came over and clapped the butler on the back, shaking
hands with him effusively.

"By Jove, Harrigan, you're a prince! Accept my heartiest thanks for
the good work you did in capturing that scoundrel. I saw the whole
thing from one of the windows, and knew right away that it must be
Budd, in spite of the farmer's disguise," chortled the Earl. "Go
inside and pour yourself out a glass of the best wine in the place on
me!"

Harrigan left us with a grin, while Budd, handcuffed in Holmes's
grasp, stood and scowled at us and ground his teeth with rage as the
great detective said:

"We've got him at last, Your Lordship, and he'll certainly get all
that's coming to him now. Just go inside and telephone down to the
village to send up two of their constables, in order that he may be
escorted into London in a manner befitting the enormity of the crime
he has committed."

But as the Earl turned away to reenter the castle, the desperate Budd
made another attempt to escape, and succeeded in breaking away from
Holmes. Down the driveway he tore at a mile a minute or so, holding
his manacled hands up before him, while Holmes for a moment seemed to
be dying of heart failure, judging by the appearance of his face.

"Great guns!" he yelled, and a couple of other expletives as well, as
he ran after the fugitive again; "he mustn't get away now, after all
the trouble we've had to get him!"

But Budd developed remarkable speed, and there was no one now to head
him off by a flank movement. But suddenly Holmes spied a farmer
driving a small wagon with a single horse along the road out in front.

"Here! your horse and wagon are commandeered in the name of the law!"
he shouted, jumping into the wagon and jerking the reins away from
their astonished owner. Then he whipped up the horse