Leaping a stile, that delayed Bill a minute to get over, Lieutenant Thornton reached the main road after a run of three minutes, and soon beheld the cause of the pistol-shot and the shriek of the female. In the road stood a travelling Berlin, with one horse still attached, the other lying dead entangled in its harness. Two men in very peculiar costumes were struggling to hold a tall, strong man, another clutched a young female by the arm, preventing her flight, whilst two others were deliberately rifling the carriage. Such a proceeding in broad daylight, and in, as he thought, a peaceable country, naturally astounded our hero, who, nevertheless, drew his couteau de chasse, without which no gentleman stirred abroad in those days, and made a spring at the powerful-looking ruffian dragging back the young female. The man with a curse drew a pistol, and fired full in William Thornton’s face; and as he did so a scream of agony escaped the young girl’s lips, but the ball only knocked off the Lieutenant’s hat, and the next instant his knife passed through the villain with such force that the hilt striking against his chest drove him to the ground, quite dead; he was dragging the fainting female down with him, but our hero caught her round the waist, and held her up. Short as was his glance of her pale face, he saw that she was young and singularly beautiful; he had no time to see more, for the second man, with a fearful execration, rushed upon the Lieutenant with a drawn knife of formidable dimensions, but Bill Saunders, who had by this time arrived on the scene of action, with only his landing-net for a weapon, just as the ruffian was about to strike at his commander with his knife, popped the net over his head, giving it such a powerful pull back that he half-strangled the man by tightening the iron rim against his throat, bringing him to the ground. “Blow me,” chuckled Bill, “if here aint a fish of another sort! How are you, my hearty, after that?” administering, as he spoke, a kick that turned the man over on his face. In the meantime the stranger, struggling with the two other ruffians, who were startled by the sudden onset of the Englishman and his companion, got free, and instantly pulling a pistol from his breast, shot the nearest to him; whilst our hero, having laid the female, who had fainted, on the bank, rushed up to assist the stranger, another female in the carriage shrieking out that the robbers would murder her father. Two of the men lying dead, one disabled, and held in Bill’s grasp like a vice, so terrified the other two that they took to their heels, plunging into the wood, and getting lost in its intricacies. The stranger ran at once to the bank, where the female our hero had rescued lay prostrate, and raising her tenderly in his arms, called out— “Julia, Julia, make haste, and come here.”