and Melfort, they shrugged their shoulders
and turned their horses away. Such a scene as this, which they but
half understood, had little enough interest for them. An officer
punishing two deserters, as they assumed to be the case, was a trifle
in comparison to the ruin which had fallen forever on their cause that
day.

The sailors fled down the passage yelling "_Au secours! au secours!_"
and "_Sauvez-nous!_" and after them rushed St. Georges, making as much
noise as he could, and so they reached first a yard behind, and then
the _potager_, or herb garden. One man dashed into an outhouse full
of billets of wood and kindlings, and yelled for mercy. "The fight is
over!" he screamed; "spare me, spare me!" and in a moment St. Georges
had shut the door and turned the key--fortunately it was outside--on
him; then he rushed after the other down the sandy path of the garden.

His object was to drive the man on as far as possible away from the
inn, and then desist from the chase and escape himself. Behind the
garden there ran another path that passed up to a copse of stunted,
miserable, wind-blown trees; if he could get into that, he might
succeed in avoiding any pursuit.

So he let the sailor gain on him as he neared this copse, and then
another chance arose before him--an unhoped, undreamed-of chance!
Tethered at the end of the garden, by the reins to the paling, was a
horse belonging possibly to some _bourgeois_ who had ridden in to the
inn from a village inland and had left his horse at the back. A chance
sent by Heaven in its mercy!

Still the sailor ran on swiftly, until, no longer hearing his pursuer
behind him, he dared to look over his shoulder, thinking the chase was
over; what he saw when he so looked caused him to renew his speed,
even to yell with fresh terror.

St. Georges was mounted now, he was urging the horse to its greatest
pace, he would be behind him in a moment. And then it would be death,
dealt from the sword wielded by the terrible Englishman--almost the
man could feel that sword through his back as he ran and the hoofs
clattered behind him!

He stumbled and nearly fell in the white sandy dust, got up again with
a shriek, and then, in a last, frenzied hope, plunged into the copse
which he had now reached. And the awful horseman passed on--could
that dust, the poor wretch wondered, have hidden him from his view?--a
moment or two more and he knew that he was safe. The clatter of the
hoofs on the ro