“How strong?” put in the other, trying clumsily to catch him unawares. “Force your way in and learn.” “But surely we can drive a bargain? There’s a price on the Pretender’s head--a trifle of thirty thousand pounds--and you can share it with us, if you will.” A sudden loathing came to Rupert as he listened to the man’s thick, guttural persuasiveness. These hired soldiery of the enemy seemed to have only two views of a man--that he could be bullied or be bought. “Go back to Captain Goldstein,” he said. “Tell him that we’re strong to stand a siege, and that--we are gentlemen of Lancashire who hold the house.” The sergeant glanced narrowly at the face above, and a suspicion took sudden hold of him. This man with the disdainful, easy air might be the Prince himself. He remembered the condition “dead or alive” attached to the blood-money, lifted his carbine, and fired point blank. The ball went wide a little; but for a moment Rupert thought that he was hit, as the splintered masonry cut across his forehead. Then he stooped, picked up a musket, and took flying aim at the man below--without avail, as he thought. It would have cheered him to see the sergeant limp round the corner of the house toward the stables. “Well?” asked Goldstein, cursing the pain that touched him as he moved quickly round. “Did the young rebel come to terms?” “He came to the butt-end of a musket against his shoulder, and the bullet grazed my knee. I shall limp for days to come.” “Then limp, you fool! What is a grazed knee with the Pretender indoors yonder----” “I’ve seen the Pretender,” said the other, getting out his pipe and filling it. “The young rebel, as you call him--the man who pretends to be Sir Jasper’s son--is Charlie Stuart. Face, and big, careless air, and belief that truce means truce in wartime--he’s Charlie to the life, the Charlie who got as far as Derby and then, with all before him, went back again.” Goldstein, with nothing to do except nurse his wound, had been thinking much the same, had been reckoning up, too, the chances of this enterprise. “They’re weak in numbers,” he said by and by. “I’m not so sure. They’re quick enough to fire from all four sides of the house.” “Yes, but the Stuart whelp would have led a sortie before this if they’d been strong.” “True,” growled the sergeant, old at campaigning. “How long shall we give them, Captain?” “A day or two. See to the sentries, keep out of fire, and we’ll see what the waiting-time will do for them. It’s a devil’s game, waiting for action that never comes--we learned that, Randolph, in the old Flanders days.” “Aye, we learned fear,” said the sergeant, harking back to some lonely enterprises that he had shared with Goldstein.