But from its support he leapt on convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the shoulder, he fell his length in the slough--but forward, with his outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature.

They sank, it is true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward, and freeing one by a last effort of strength--he could not free both, and, as it was, half his face was submerged--he reached out another yard, and gripped a balk of wood, which projected from the corner of the building for the purpose of fending off the stream in flood-time.
The men at the window shrieked with rage as he slowly drew himself from the slough, and stood from head to foot a pillar of mud.

Shout as they might, they had no firearms, and, crowded together in the narrow embrasure, they could take no aim with their pikes.

They could only look on in furious impotence, flinging curses at him until he passed from their view, behind the angle of the building.
Here for a score of yards a strip of hard foreshore ran between mud and wall.

He struggled along it until he reached the end of the wall; then with a shuddering glance at the black heaving pit from which he had escaped, and which yet gurgled above the body of the hapless Maudron--a tribute to horror which even his fierce nature could not withhold--he turned and painfully climbed the river-bank.