Count Hannibal

He alighted on it, and drove it deep into the quaking slime; but he

himself bounded off right-handed. The peril was appalling, the

possibility untried, the chance one which only a doomed man would have

taken. But he reached the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a

precarious footing. He could not regain his balance, he could not even

for an instant stand upright on it. But from its support he leapt on

convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the

shoulder, he fell his length in the slough--but forward, with his

outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature. They sank, it is

true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward,

and freeing one by a last effort of strength--he could not free both,

and, as it was, half his face was submerged--he reached out another yard,

and gripped a balk of wood, which projected from the corner of the

building for the purpose of fending off the stream in flood-time.

The men at the window shrieked with rage as he slowly drew himself from

the slough, and stood from head to foot a pillar of mud. Shout as they

might, they had no firearms, and, crowded together in the narrow

embrasure, they could take no aim with their pikes. They could only look

on in furious impotence, flinging curses at him until he passed from

their view, behind the angle of the building.

Here for a score of yards a strip of hard foreshore ran between mud and

wall. He struggled along it until he reached the end of the wall; then

with a shuddering glance at the black heaving pit from which he had

escaped, and which yet gurgled above the body of the hapless Maudron--a

tribute to horror which even his fierce nature could not withhold--he

turned and painfully climbed the river-bank. The pike-wound in his

shoulder was slight, but the effort had been supreme; the sweat poured

from his brow, his visage was grey and drawn. Nevertheless, when he had

put fifty paces between himself and the buildings of the Arsenal he

paused, and turned. He saw that the men had run to other windows which

looked that way; and his face lightened and his form dilated with

triumph.

He shook his fist at them. "Ho, fools!" he cried, "you kill not Tavannes

so! Till our next meeting at Montfaucon, fare you well!"