g
chance."

Young Medlicott glanced upstairs from his post on the threshold. I
refrained from watching him too keenly, but I knew what was in his mind.

"I'll go," he said hurriedly. "I'll go as I am, before my mother is
disturbed and frightened out of her life. I owe you something, too,
not only for what you've done for me, but for what I was fool enough to
think about you at the first blush. It's entirely through you that I
feel as fit as I do for the moment. So I'll take your tip, and go just
as I am, before my poor old pipes strike up another tune."

I scarcely looked up until the good fellow had turned his back upon the
final tableau of watchful officer and prostrate prisoner and gone out
wheezing into the night. But I was at the door to hear the last of him
down the path and round the corner of the house. And when I rushed back
into the room, there was Raffles sitting cross-legged on the floor, and
slowly shaking his broken head as he stanched the blood.

"Et tu, Bunny!" he groaned. "Mine own familiar friend!"

"Then you weren't even stunned!" I exclaimed. "Thank God for that!"

"Of course I was stunned," he murmured, "and no thanks to you that I
wasn't brained. Not to know me in the kit you've seen scores of times!
You never looked at me, Bunny; you didn't give me time to open my
mouth. I was going to let you run me in so prettily! We'd have walked
off arm-in-arm; now it's as tight a place as ever we were in, though
you did get rid of old blow-pipes rather nicely. But we shall have the
devil's own run for our money!"

Raffles had picked himself up between his mutterings, and I had
followed him to the door into the garden, where he stood busy with the
key in the dark, having blown out his lantern and handed it to me. But
though I followed Raffles, as my nature must, I was far too embittered
to answer him again. And so it was for some minutes that might furnish
forth a thrilling page, but not a novel one to those who know their
Raffles and put up with me. Suffice it that we left a locked door
behind us, and the key on the garden wall, which was the first of half
a dozen that we scaled before dropping into a lane that led to a
foot-bridge higher up the backwater. And when we paused upon the
foot-bridge, the houses along the bank were still in peace and darkness.

Knowing my Raffles as I did, I was not surprised when he dived under
one end of this bridge, and came up with his Inverness cape and