hardly be called moving, and Patty watched it
fascinated. Then it stopped, and Patty, creeping nearer, stood over it,
and watched more closely. Something was breathing inside! Something
inside that pack was alive! Patty could now clearly see the movement
that each respiration made. She had made up her mind, and now she took
her courage in both hands.

She retreated softly to the opposite side of the room, and raising the
rifle to her shoulder fired.

There was a loud, a deafening report, a shrill scream, and a stream of
blood trickled forth from the pack. Fanny was in the room crying
hysterically, Mrs. Tucker and cook were looking over her shoulder with
blanched faces.

Patty, with her face not one whit less white than any of the others,
laid the smoking rifle on the table, and spoke with a tremulousness not
usual to her.

"Mrs. Tucker, some vile plot has been hatched to rob this house while
your master is away. That pack doesn't hold finery as Fanny was at first
led to believe, but it holds a man, and I have shot him."

With trembling hands and colourless lips Mrs. Tucker, with the help of
her maids, cut away the oilcloth that bound the pack together, and
disclosed the face of a short sturdy man, it was the face of the late
coachman, Timothy Smith! With one voice they cried aloud as they saw it.

"Dead! Is he dead?" cried Patty, shuddering and covering her face with
her hands. "Oh, Mrs. Tucker, and it is I who have killed him!"

A groan from the prostrate figure reassured the party as to the fatality
of the adventure, and aroused in them a sense of the necessity of doing
what they could to relieve the sufferings of their prostrate enemy.

The huddled-up position occupied by the man when in the pack made him,
of course, a good target, and made it possible for a single shot to do
much more mischief than it might have done in passing once through any
single part of his body. It was, of course, a random shot, and entering
the pack vertically as the man was crouching with his hands upon his
knees, it passed through his right arm and left hand and lodged in his
left knee, thus completely disabling him without touching a vital part.

With some difficulty they managed to get the wounded man on to a chair
bedstead which they brought from the housekeeper's room for the purpose,
and such "first aid" as Patty was able to render was quickly given.

"And now," said Patty, "the question is, who will ride Black Bess to the