CHAPTER XII.
THE KING'S LAST SERVICE.
"Is he up there ?" asked a voice in the darkness.
"Not likely.

A cat couldn't scramble up that woodwork," answered a second.
"Send a shot, and try," suggested a third.
There he lay, stretched motionless on the flat roof of the veranda.

He heard the words as the thronging mob surged, and trampled, and swore, and quarreled, beneath him, in the blackness of the gloom; balked of their prey, and savage for some amends.

There was a moment's pause--a hurried, eager consultation; then he heard the well-known sound of a charge being rammed down, and the sharp drawing out of a ramrod; there was a flash, a report, a line of light flamed a second in his sight; a ball hissed past him with a loud, singing rush, and bedded itself in the timber, a few inches above his uncovered hair.

A dead silence followed; then the muttering of many voices broke out afresh.
"He's not there, at any rate," said one, who seemed the chief; "he couldn't have kept as still as that with a shot so near him.