It snapped with a sharp report, and when the smoke cleared I found Mr. Denham had dodged the fire and was closed in a scuffle with the villain for the weapon. A dozen more seemed to spring on him from the threshold; I heard his wife's cry of agony; and then the door at the other side burst in, and Lester, with his gray eyes gleaming like a flame, bounded over the body of a bloody convict that fell from his grasp as he broke into the room. Quick as thought he caught up one of the heavy chairs in his hands, and bringing it down with desperate force on the heads of the governor's assailants, felled one, while the other staggered back and dropped his pistol. Mr. Denham caught it like a flash, and fired it in the face of a wretch who was aiming at Lester's heart. The convicts fell back, and over their bodies the governor and his aid sprang into the crowded hall. "The child! the child! O God! my little daughter!" It was Ruth's voice in tones of such anguish and terror as I never before heard uttered by human voice. She was looking from the window into the yard below, and there she beheld Nellie lifted up as a shield against the guns of the guards by a party of the escaping convicts. The little creature was deadly white and perfectly silent: her great blue eyes were wide and frozen with fright, and her little hands were clasped in entreating agony and stretched toward her mother. "Stand behind me and shoot them down, governor," cried Lester, dealing steady blows with the now broken chair, and trying to make his own body a shield for Mr. Denham. The governor continued to fire on the convicts, who were pouring in a steady stream down the stairs from out of the room where I had seen the shower of dust, and through the ceiling of which, as it was afterward, proved, they had cut a hole, and 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.