Only when Tavannes seemed to ponder on his message, and to be
fain to delay, "Go on," he muttered with brutal frankness; "your time is
up!"
Tavannes started, the paper slipped from his fingers. Maudron saw a
chance of getting it without committing himself, and quick as the thought
leapt up in his mind he stooped, and grasped the paper, and would have
leapt back with it! But quick as he, and quicker, Tavannes too stooped,
gripped him by the waist, and with a prodigious effort, and a yell in
which all the man's stormy nature, restrained to a part during the last
few minutes, broke forth, he flung the ill-fated wretch head first
through the window.
The movement carried Tavannes himself--even while his victim's scream
rang through the chamber--into the embrasure. An instant he hung on the
verge; then, as the men, a moment thunderstruck, sprang forward to avenge
their comrade, he leapt out, jumping for the struggling body that had
struck the mud, and now lay in it face downwards.
He alighted on it, and drove it deep into the quaking slime; but he
himself bounded off right-handed. The peril was appalling, the
possibility untried, the chance one which only a doomed man would have
taken. But he reached the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a
precarious footing.
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