d so escaped from the upper corridor of the prison.

I tried to hold Ruth in my arms, for in her frenzy to reach her child
she had flung up the window and endeavored to drop from it at the risk
of her life. "They will not dare to hurt her: God will protect her
innocent life," was all I could say, when a random ball from below
struck the window-frame, and, glancing off, stunned without wounding
the wretched mother. She fell, jarred by the shock, and I drew her as
well as I could behind the door, on the other side of which lay the
two bleeding prisoners who had tried to take her husband's life.

Groans, shouts, curses, yells and pistol-shots sounded in the hall and
on the stairs; only the back of the chair remained in Lester's grasp,
but heaps of men felled by its weight and crushed by their struggling
fellows had tumbled down and been kicked over the broken balustrade to
the hall below.

The guards had rallied from their surprise, and sparing the escaped
for the sake of the precious shield they bore, turned their fire upon
the escaping, cutting them off until the whole corridor below was
blocked with wounded, dead and dying. One more man appeared at the
clerk's door: he was a powerful fellow with a horse-pistol and a
stone-hammer. Lester had staggered back from a flying iron bar aimed
at his head by a villain he struck at without reaching, and who had
bounded down the stairs to receive his death from the guard's musket
at the door. The prisoner with the horse-pistol saw his advantage,
and, cursing the governor in blasphemous rage, aimed at him as he
fled. Recovering himself, Lester struck for his arm, but not soon
enough to stop the fire: the charge reached its object, but not his
heart, as it was meant to do. It glanced aside, and Mr. Denham's
pistol dropped: his right arm fell maimed at his side; but the field
was clear, and Lester, catching the fallen pistol, went down the
stairs over the bodies in a series of flying leaps.

"Where's my wife?" exclaimed Mr. Denham, turning round dizzily and
trying to steady his head with his uninjured hand. "Tell her I've gone
for Nellie;" and he made an effort to rush after Lester, but,
reaching the top of the stairs, dropped suddenly upon a convict's body
stretched there by his own pistol. Then I saw by the reddish hole
in his trousers just below the knee that he had been wounded before,
though he did not know it, and was now streaming with blood.

"Where's Nell? where's Edward