his prisoner to the bed. Then he got up and went to the door. The house
was quite silent, quite dark. Wogan shut the door gently--there was no
key in the lock--and bending over the bed looked into the face of his
assailant. The face was twisted with pain, the whites of the eyes glared
horribly, but Wogan could see that the man was his landlord.

He stood up and thought. There was another man who had met him in the
village and had guided him to the inn; there was still a third who had
gone out of the kitchen as Wogan had entered it; there was the wife,
too, who might be awake.

Wogan crossed to the window and looked out. The window was perhaps
twenty feet from the ground, but the stanchion was three feet below the
window. He quickly put on his clothes, slipped the letter from under his
pillow into a pocket, strapped his saddle-bag and lowered it from the
window by a blanket. He had already one leg on the sill when a
convulsive movement of the man on the bed made him stop. He climbed back
into the room, drew the knife out of the board and out of the hand
pinned to the board, and making a bandage wrapped the wound up.

"You must lie there till morning, my friend," Wogan whispered in his
ear, "but here's a thing to console you. I have found a name for your
inn; I have painted the device upon your sign-board. The 'Inn of the
Five Red Fingers.' There's never a passer-by but will stop to inquire
the reason of so conspicuous a sign;" and Wogan climbed out of the
window, lowered himself till he hung at the full length of his arms from
the stanchion, and dropped on the ground. He picked up his saddle-bag
and crept round the house to the stable. The door needed only a push to
open it. In the hay-loft above he heard a man snoring. Mr. Wogan did not
think it worth while to disturb him. He saddled his horse, walked it out