“Hullo! look o' there, naow! What's that 'ere stickin' aout o' y'r boot?” It was nothing but the handle of an ugly knife, which Abel instantly relieved him of. The party now took up the line of march for old Doctor Kittredge's house, Abel carrying the pistol and knife, and Mr. Bernard walking in silence, still half-stunned, holding the hay-fork, which Abel had thrust into his hand. It was all a dream to him as yet. He remembered the horseman riding at him, and his firing the pistol; but whether he was alive, and these walls around him belonged to the village of Rockland, or whether he had passed the dark river, and was in a suburb of the New Jerusalem, he could not as yet have told. They were in the street where the Doctor's house was situated. “I guess I'll fire off one o' these here berrils,” said Abel. He fired. Presently there was a noise of opening windows, and the nocturnal head-dresses of Rockland flowered out of them like so many developments of the Nightblooming Cereus. White cotton caps and red bandanna handkerchiefs were the prevailing forms of efflorescence. The main point was that the village was waked up. The old Doctor always waked easily, from long habit, and was the first among those who looked out to see what had happened. “Why, Abel!” he called out, “what have you got there? and what 's all this noise about?” “We've ketched the Portagee!” Abel answered, as laconically as the hero of Lake Erie, in his famous dispatch. “Go in there, you fellah!” The prisoner was marched into the house, and the Doctor, who had bewitched his clothes upon him in a way that would have been miraculous in anybody but a physician, was down in presentable form as soon as if it had been a child in a fit that he was sent for. “Richard Veneer!” the Doctor exclaimed. “What is the meaning of all this? Mr. Langdon, has anything happened to you?” Mr. Bernard put his hand to his head. “My mind is confused,” he said. “I've had a fall.--Oh, yes!--wait a minute and it will all come back to me.” “Sit down, sit down,” the Doctor said. “Abel will tell me about it. Slight concussion of the brain. Can't remember very well for an hour or two,--will come right by to-morrow.” “Been stunded,” Abel said. “He can't tell nothin'.” Abel then proceeded to give a Napoleonic bulletin of the recent combat of cavalry and infantry and its results,--none slain, one captured. The Doctor looked at the prisoner through his spectacles. “What 's the matter with your shoulder, Venner?” Dick answered sullenly, that he didn't know, fell on it when his horse came down. The Doctor examined it as carefully as he could through his clothes. “Out of joint. Untie his hands, Abel” By this time a small alarm had spread among the neighbors, and there was a circle around Dick, who glared about on the assembled honest people like a hawk with a broken wing. When the Doctor said, “Untie his hands,” the circle widened perceptibly.