been so marked he could not have escaped a day!"

"Will it be alive--_or dead_?"

"Dead, if he resists, at daybreak, in an hour. Then they will come
for him; it is arranged. And take him--doubtless slay him. What
matter? The reward is the same. 'Alive or dead,' says the paper--they
showed it me at La Poste--'one hundred gold pistoles.' And the horse
will be ours, too."

"How will they do it?"

"Hist! Listen. And get you to bed before they come. You need not be in
it. I have arranged it, _je te dis_."

"But how--how--how?"

"I will awake him, bid him hurry; tell him he is discovered, lost,
unless he flies. Then, doubtless, he will rush to the door, and, poof!
they will cut him down as he rushes out. I have told them he is
violent. They must strike at once. _Tu comprends?_"

"Yes," and it seemed to the listener as if the woman had answered with
a shudder.

"And," the man said again, "the horse will be ours, too. I have not
told them of that. No! we shall have that and the pistoles. Now, get
you to bed. They will be here ere long. The day is coming. His last on
earth if he runs out suddenly or resists."

The listener heard a moment or two later a stealthy tread upon the
stairs outside--a tread that passed his door and went on upstairs and
was then no more apparent. It was the woman withdrawing from the place
where he was to be slain.

To be slain! Possibly. Yet, he determined, not as the man had arranged
it. To be slain it might be, but not without a struggle, an attempt
for life; without himself slaying others.

He crept to the window after finding that the door had been locked
from the outside--no doubt during his long slumber!--and gazed out. It
was not yet near daybreak; the miserable street was still in
darkness; in no window was there any light--but above in the heavens
there was, however, a gray tinge that told of the coming day. Then he
looked around.

Beneath the window, which was a common dormer one, as is almost always
the case in northern France and the Netherlands, there was nothing but
the rain pipe running beneath it along the length of the house. Below
was the street full of cobble and other stones--a good thirty feet
below! To drop that height, even though hanging by his hands to the
rain pipe and thereby diminishing the distance some eight feet would,
however, be impossible; it would mean broken ankles and legs and
dislocated thigh bones. Yet, what else to do? Behind him was the
locked d