e crossed his mind--of a leap across the dyke, and a
wild dash through the fog. But the futility of it was too appalling.
The musketeers were already blowing their matches. He would suffer the
ignominy of being shot in the back, like a coward, if he made any such
attempt.

And so, despairing but not resigned, he took his stand on the very edge
of the ditch. In an irony of obligingness he set half of his heels over
the void, so that he was nicely balanced upon the edge of the cutting,
and must go backwards and down into the mud when hit.

It was this position he had taken that gave him an inspiration in that
last moment. The sergeant had moved away out of the line of fire, and he
stood there alone, waiting, erect and with his head held high, his
eyes upon the grey mass of musketeers--blurred alike by mist and
semi-darkness--some twenty paces distant along the line of which glowed
eight red fuses.

Wentworth's voice rang out with the words of command.

"Blow your matches!"

Brighter gleamed the points of light, and under their steel pots the
faces of the musketeers, suffused by a dull red glow, sprang for a
moment out of the grey mass, to fade once more into the general greyness
at the word, "Cock your matches!"

"Guard your pans!" came a second later the captain's voice, and then:

"Present!"

There was a stir and rattle, and the dark, indistinct figure standing
on the lip of the ditch was covered by the eight muskets. To the eyes of
the firing-party he was no more than a blurred shadowy form, showing a
little darker than the encompassing dark grey.

"Give fire!"

On the word Mr. Wilding lost the delicate, precarious balance he had
been sustaining on the edge of the ditch, and went over backwards, at
the imminent risk--as he afterwards related--of breaking his neck.
At the same instant a jagged, eight-pointed line of flame slashed the
darkness, and the thunder of the volley pealed forth to lose itself in
the greater din of battle on Penzoy Pound, hard by.

CHAPTER XXIII. MR. WILDING'S BOOTS

In the filth of the ditch, Mr. Wilding rolled over and lay prone. He
threw out his left arm, and rested his brow upon it to keep his face
above the mud. He strove to hold his breath, not that he might dissemble
death, but that he might avoid being poisoned by the foul gases that,
disturbed by his weight, bubbled up to choke him. His body half sank
and settled in the mud, and seen from above, as he was presently s