"Pish! what folly is this!" he muttered peevishly. "A gentleman of the road, a despoiler of timid travellers, shivering and shaking because he finds himself alone, drawing on for midnight, on a solitary bit of the King's highway! I shall be frightened of my own shadow next. Captain Nightshade would indeed laugh me to scorn." He patted his mare on the neck and began to walk her up and down on the narrow stretch of turf which fringed the road on either hand. It was not one of the great thoroughfares running north and south, busy day and night with traffic in one or other of its manifold forms, but merely a by-road between one provincial town and another. The only living things seen by our young horseman while he waited were a drove of cattle, in charge of a couple of men, on their way to Appleford market. While they were passing he withdrew into the shade of the plantation. After all, he had hardly so long to wait as he had feared he would have. John Dyce had not been more than a quarter of an hour gone when his straining ears caught the faint sound of wheels. He had already adjusted the crape mask he had brought with him, and settled his chin in the ample folds of the India silk muffler he had tied round his throat. He now set his hat more firmly on his head, and drew a pistol from its holster. And now, some distance down the road, there shone two yellow points of flame, as they might be the eyes of some wild animal shining in the dark. They were the lamps of the coming chaise. Nearer and nearer sounded the hoof-beats of the horses on the hard road. A minute more and the whole concern had passed out of the moonlight into the gully of blackness in which our horseman was lurking. The moment for action had come. Three strides of his horse brought him into a line with the postilion. "Halt, or you are a dead man!" he called out in commanding tones, as he held a pistol to the man's head, and at once the horses were pulled up short on their haunches. It was not the first command of the kind that postilion had been called upon to obey. The highwayman had brought no lantern with him. He knew, or thought he knew, quite well who the occupant of the chaise was. He could just discern a vague huddled-up figure in one corner. And now, in no uncertain voice, came the formula, sacred by long use on such occasions: "Your money or your life!" Not that it was the traveller's money our young friend was risking so much to obtain, but something very different, only he had not seen his way at the moment to vary the customary command. The answer was a flash and a report from the interior of the chaise, and the same instant a harsh voice yelled out, "Drive on Tim, and be damned to you!" Hardly had the words left his lips before the post-boy's lash came down heavily on his horses, and the chaise sprang forward.