"He's got us into this," Hazlett spoke; "we'll try to get to him, and maybe we can cross the Shenandoah bridge."

They had now come on the flanks of High Street and were keeping down it, sheltering from observation wherever possible; Quantrell going ahead, and the other two concealing their short guns in their blankets and hiding their belts of knives and pistols.

Suddenly the sound of horse's hoofs was heard upon the turnpike's stones, and before they could secrete themselves a fine-looking, martial-riding man was right upon them, going at a gallop.

Both Hazlett and Lehman dropped a hand to their concealed revolvers and measured the man's body with an inner light of meaning in their eyes.

"Whaw aw they? Whaw aw they?" he cried. A rifle was over his shoulder.

"Whaw who?" Lehman exclaimed, with mischief-like inno

cence.

"The Arabs who have dragged my friend Colonel Washington from his bed."

"Down yonder." Quantrell waved his hand toward the lower

town.

"I'll settle with them," hallooed the rider, "whawever they aw. I'll die fo' my friend, sah."

As he pricked his horse on, Hazlett raised his pistol.

“I'll drop him in the road," said Hazlett; “it's against orders for citizens to carry arms, and that man's a trained soldier. Look at his square, straight shoulders."

Quantrell struck the pistol down with his hand.

"Don't kill that man for risking his life for his friend," he entreated. "Every life you take will be reckoned against you. Kill me, if you want a life!"

While Hazlett stared muddily at Quantrell, as if going to cut him to pieces, a voice was heard calling:

"Come on! come on, heah!"

They saw the negro Ashby, who had climbed the hills from the river, and all hastened toward him.

"De armory's mos' tuk," he said. "Dey got Thompson off'n de bridge. Dar's no way to git to Cap'n Brown now but by de big gate, an' solgers is stoppin' up boff de bridges. Cap'n Brown says come quick and bring Cap'n Kagi's comman' to him."

"Kagi's killed, Ashby," Quantrell spoke; "he and all his men

but one-Copeland, the mulatto. What will happen to him the angels fear to know!"

"O my God!" the negro sighed, in agony of fear and sorrow.

There trotted in their midst the pointer-dog Albion, insinuating and mysterious as ever. His muzzle was as straight out as his tail; his leg pawed with nothing, kitten-like; his fine white spots in the brown neck seemed like flies in stale liver at butchers' stalls; the outcast life of a single forenoon had gone thus far toward demoralizing animals and men.

Albion rather fawned upon all the party, and showed a suspicious recognition of their friendship, which may have led Lehman to say:

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Albert, I shall go by the upper yard. "Twon't do for both of us to be took. You go by the town and take these two men along. One of us, I calkelate, if not both, will get to Captain Brown that way."

The two men clasped each other's hands.

Fight, Will, and never be taken!" Hazlett said.

"I'll do my best, Albert. If the worst comes, we've got friends across the river-and friends up yonder, too!"

He looked to heaven, and a tear filled his bright eye.

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Forward now, both of you!" Hazlett exclaimed, as Lehman disappeared down the raveling face of the heights, and he drove Ashby and Quantrell down the road before him, his rifle and eye equally sentient and ready.

"Ashby," whispered Quantrell, "by hurrying, you may cross the Potomac Bridge before the troops in Maryland seize it. Remember my directions! Go to Bosler's, in Catoctin Valley. Here is all my money. Let Luther go and buy you, and hasten to me.”

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Mosster," said the negro, taking the gold pieces with fear, "what makes you trust me?

"The fear of God!" said Quantrell. "Something in this world is wrong, and I want to lend to the Lord."

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God bless you, mosster!" said the negro, huskily; "I'll try to git away, faw yo' sake!”

No sympathetic light was in the man Hazlett's eyes, and he watched them both with a merciless energy, the greater because he was now wholly self-dependent.

Quantrell remembered the acts of rowdyism he had assisted in toward unarmed and helpless foreigners, and wondered if it was in

the remembrance of mercy to save his life. He remembered the contemptuous idea he had entertained of the courage of "Yankees," whom he had nearly included among the "foreigners,” and asked himself if he dared, even with the negro Ashby's neutrality, or possible help, to fall upon this hard, self-reliant, unadorned fellow in the rear, and contend with him to the death.

He turned twice, with this thought in his mind, and, steady as a common, regular soldier of the line, Hazlett was looking at him with his eyes, and, Lloyd thought, with his wrists too, so supple were those wrists with weapons and sensibility.

"He is a Western man," mused our hero; all of them are Western men. What is this West I have heard so little of in my geography? When did it arise? And is it all for abolition?"

They now had entered the short, closely settled, down-hill portion of the street, where shops, sign-posts, small bay-windows, lower areas and ladders into back yards, upper verandas, mechanics' stalls, flights of stairs toward precipices, overhanging dormers, flaunting clothes on clothes-lines, and all the accompaniments of a disturbed or suddenly deserted town, closed around them tattered and grimy in the narrow throat of Harper's Ferry.

Guns and pistols and old blunderbusses began to rattle again in the hollow depths of the place, and the rain drizzled from the spotted sky above. At the foot of the street they saw the dog Albion, which had rushed on before, barking at a hog that was too familiar with the dead body of Newby, lying there.

No forms were to be seen in the street, but the heads of some men appeared beneath the stoops or basements of porches, all turned down toward the dead negro and the street which crossed that one Quantrell was descending. The reason for this was plain when, in a moment, two men, like Brown's followers, stepped out from the arsenal side there and fired up the street.

The men down in the intrenched and recessed basements of the shops returned the fire in another instant.

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This way!" Hazlett called, hoarsely, pointing up the hill to the right.

A scrap of street found lodgment in there, and, going the same way as the High Street, soon left it far below.

In the intensity of the moment Quantrell saw all things in the view-the chimneys, the chickens picking garbage in the street, carts uptilted at the curbs, plastered walls, and stone and brick escarp

ments on the roofs, uneven pavements of blue limestone, wild children yet without breakfast screaming or sleeping up the tenement halls and alleys; and, finally, the Catholic church at the cornice and ridge of everything, holding its pale golden cross to the moody heavens, and by its side the bell, suspended in a derrick of timber, seemed to be taking a second nap after having called in vain for others to arise.

Again the Shenandoah was seen beyond the mills and islands, cowering as it ran beneath the great gnarled mountain. Again, the mighty, scarred form of Maryland Heights reared back like a beheaded buffalo. The blended rivers, breaking in ripples over gridirons of rock, went down the mountain vistas like fugitive hosts of dead-faced people, flying from the wrath of Nature; or the volcano's lava-channel in the sheen of the moon.

But in this general awe there was indifference too—the indifference of the great to the little, of the torpid to the quick; the indifference of the basking crocodile to the bees upon his jaws; the inconsiderateness of mountains, after their convulsion, to the writhing of the birds that serpents in their bowels charm; the languor of old geology in its nap of cycles to the newsboy's darling revolution of some few people slain in riots.

John Brown had made no impression upon the trance of Nature. The hollow ear of heaven bending overhead considered him nothe, nor the perishing insects he had disciplined for another skirmish in the brief antiquity of freedom.

"Ashby, I see the men in Maryland yonder. You have time to cross the bridge—just time, not a moment to spare!"

“Come on, then, and go before!” cried Hazlett, descending the ragged natural steps from the church to the street.

As they crept down these steps, shot rattled in the High Street below, and Quantrell and Ashby hesitated.

I'll take a shot," spoke Hazlett, with a deadly zest for combat in his heavy eyes; and, stepping down, he raised his gun and fired up the street.

"I left my mark that time," Hazlett said, surveying his work and opening his rifle-breech. "Now for the next slave-catcher!"

He had barely spoken when a ball or wad, or other instrument of percussion, struck his cartridge-box, and it began to explode, like Chinese fire-crackers. One by one the deadly projectiles broke forth, each with its cylinder of lead, and Hazlett sought in vain to

throw it away from him, but the belt would not come loose. He danced in a frenzy of endeavor and apprehension, balls tearing his clothes, others whizzing near Quantrell's head; and the sight was so ludicrous that, as Lloyd threw himself down, he began to laugh till the tears came to his eyes.

“He's all fired out, I reckon, now,” Ashby exclaimed, as the explosions ceased. "What mus' I do?"

“Run for the bridge! Tell him to run with you! Remember Crampton's Gap, the Catoctin Valley, and Jake Bosler's farm." "I'm goin'," said the negro. Come, Mr. Hazlett, fo' yo' life!" As Hazlett turned to look at Quantrell, the latter had a rock in his hand.

"I'll kill you if you come here!" Quantrell cried; “your carbine is empty and your cartridges are all gone. Keep off!"

Hazlett slipped across the street into the lane by the river. In a moment Lloyd saw him appear in the space before the armorygate, where he hesitated, as if thinking to turn in. The negro Ashby dashed past him and ran toward the bridge.

Being fired upon from the houses and hill-tops, Hazlett affected to be aiming his empty piece, and, stooping down and backing off, he finally disappeared behind the corner at the arsenal, and next was seen upon the bridge, running after Ashby at the top of his speed.

Both men ran, and Lloyd followed them with intense interest. He felt that the colored man's life had already been interposed for his, and might be his hostage with Destiny again.

The soldiers on the Maryland shore were very near the bridge, also, and now began to run toward it, firing their pieces.

It was a race for life with Hazlett and his dusky associate. In another moment Quantrell saw both these men emerge from the distant end of the bridge, and steal along the base of the heights toward Pleasant Valley and the roofs of Sandy Hook.

'I've made a banker of a negro, who has every inducement to run away," Lloyd Quantrell said, "and yet, I don't believe he will; for, queerly enough, I never heard of a negro committing a breach of trust."

He peeped around the abutments of rock and houses at the foot of the stone steps.

Some townspeople were huddled beneath a low porch, looking down intently at an object they also sought to raise.