th, making a spring toward the door
by which Lester had gone out.

Her husband, forgetting his lameness, was instantly at her side, but
some force held the door against them both, and abandoning it after
the first effort, the father turned hurriedly to the one leading
into the hall. I sat nearest that, and in the excitement I had moved
quickly aside, so that when it was flung violently open the moment
before my host the governor of the prison reached it, I was thrust
back against the wall, from which place, half dead with fright, I saw
the hall crowded with convicts, the foremost of whom held a pistol
directly toward Mr. Denham's head.

It snapped with a sharp report, and when the smoke cleared I found
Mr. Denham had dodged the fire and was closed in a scuffle with the
villain for the weapon. A dozen more seemed to spring on him from the
threshold; I heard his wife's cry of agony; and then the door at the
other side burst in, and Lester, with his gray eyes gleaming like a
flame, bounded over the body of a bloody convict that fell from his
grasp as he broke into the room. Quick as thought he caught up one
of the heavy chairs in his hands, and bringing it down with desperate
force on the heads of the governor's assailants, felled one, while the
other staggered back and dropped his pistol. Mr. Denham caught it
like a flash, and fired it in the face of a wretch who was aiming
at Lester's heart. The convicts fell back, and over their bodies the
governor and his aid sprang into the crowded hall.

"The child! the child! O God! my little daughter!" It was Ruth's voice
in tones of such anguish and terror as I never before heard uttered by
human voice.

She was looking from the window into the yard below, and there she
beheld Nellie lifted up as a shield against the guns of the guards by
a party of the escaping convicts. The little creature was deadly white
and perfectly silent: her great blue eyes were wide and frozen with
fright, and her little hands were clasped in entreating agony and
stretched toward her mother.

"Stand behind me and shoot them down, governor," cried Lester, dealing
steady blows with the now broken chair, and trying to make his own
body a shield for Mr. Denham. The governor continued to fire on the
convicts, who were pouring in a steady stream down the stairs from
out of the room where I had seen the shower of dust, and through the
ceiling of which, as it was afterward, proved, they had cut a hole,
an