Slowly and painfully their wearer descended from step to step, in the half light of the stairs and corridor. When he reached the foot, the Irish officer stepped back to make more room for the Tory's three friends. These now came from the guard-room, and stood with half smiling, half shocked faces, to give the old man greeting. When he reached the lowest step, they held out their hands to him, but, to their astonishment, as the guard let go his arm, he darted forth between two of them, strode past the sentries at the outer prison door, and, ignoring the waiting coach, plunged down the street with an alacrity miraculous in one so enfeebled, and turned off at right angles into the first street that ran southward. "His imprisonment has crazed him!" cried one of the three gentlemen. "Hell and damnation!" cried the Irish officer, rushing up the stairs and motioning the guard to follow. Entering the cell, he stepped over the prostrate bodies of several prisoners to a figure that lay motionless in a corner. The clothes on this figure were Dick Wetheral's, but the face was that of the dead old Tory. With a curse, and a gesture of threat at the prisoners in the cell, the officer bounded back to the door, fastened it, and leaped down the stairs to order a pursuit. At about the same moment, Dick, tossing the old man's wig back towards the prison from which he ran, thus conversed jubilantly and defiantly with himself: "Cut my leg off, eh? Not if it and its comrade serve me properly to-day! The printer was right,--'twould have been a shame to waste that order of release on a dead man!" As he ran, he divested himself of the old Tory's cumbersome coat, throwing it over a gate into an alley-way between two houses, and he also mentally justified his apparent selfishness in consenting to be the one who should use the opportunity of escape. As the printer and others had argued, in the few moments available for discussion, Dick's leg was at stake, he had been singled out for the harshest treatment, there was an evident intention to persecute the life out of him, and the others might be presently exchanged, which Dick could not hope to be as long as the machinations of his enemy could hinder. When the vital resources called forth by excitement were used up, and Dick fell back to his weakened and wounded condition, his gait became a walk. Fortunately, until that time, his way had been mainly through a deserted street, so that his running had attracted no attention. Reaching a more populous thoroughfare, on which he saw more soldiers than citizens, he proceeded southwestwardly in a preoccupied manner, his coatless condition being easily accounted for by the heat of the season. At last he sat down to rest on the steps of a large brick church, at a corner where the street opened to a great, green, hilly, partly wooded space, which he knew, from previous description and from the military tents now upon it, to be the Common.