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.

He could not regain his balance, he could not even for an instant stand upright on it.