The guards had rallied from their surprise, and sparing the escaped for the sake of the precious shield they bore, turned their fire upon the escaping, cutting them off until the whole corridor below was blocked with wounded, dead and dying. One more man appeared at the clerk's door: he was a powerful fellow with a horse-pistol and a stone-hammer. Lester had staggered back from a flying iron bar aimed at his head by a villain he struck at without reaching, and who had bounded down the stairs to receive his death from the guard's musket at the door. The prisoner with the horse-pistol saw his advantage, and, cursing the governor in blasphemous rage, aimed at him as he fled. Recovering himself, Lester struck for his arm, but not soon enough to stop the fire: the charge reached its object, but not his heart, as it was meant to do. It glanced aside, and Mr. Denham's pistol dropped: his right arm fell maimed at his side; but the field was clear, and Lester, catching the fallen pistol, went down the stairs over the bodies in a series of flying leaps. "Where's my wife?" exclaimed Mr. Denham, turning round dizzily and trying to steady his head with his uninjured hand. "Tell her I've gone for Nellie;" and he made an effort to rush after Lester, but, reaching the top of the stairs, dropped suddenly upon a convict's body stretched there by his own pistol. Then I saw by the reddish hole in his trousers just below the knee that he had been wounded before, though he did not know it, and was now streaming with blood. "Where's Nell? where's Edward?" asked Ruth, sitting up with a ghastly face, and looking at me in a bewildered stare. "All right, all safe, tell the lady," cried a clear, exulting voice from below: "here's sweet little Miss Nellie, without a scratch on her." It was Lester's shout from the yard, and it rang through all the building. "Do you hear, Ruth? do you hear?" I screamed, beside myself with joy and thankfulness. "He has saved your husband a dozen times, that hero, and now he brings back your child to you. Oh, what a noble fellow! how I envy him his feelings!" He was in the room by this time with Nellie in his arms: he heard me and gave me just one look. I never saw him again, but I never shall forget it, for it revealed the long agony of a blighted life that moment struggling into hope again through expiation. He did not wait for Ruth's broken cry of gratitude, but was gone as soon as the child was in her arms. "Come, boys," I heard him cry cheerily outside, "lend a hand to help the governor to his room: he's got a scratch or two, and the doctor's coming to dress them. He will be all right again before we can get things set straight round here."