creature without a thought of malice,
who kept his master's accounts. He fired the first shot at the foremost
man, as he related in after days, 'to reduce the odds.' Kirby said to
Countess Fanny, just to comfort her, never so much as imagining she
would be afraid, 'The worst will be a bloody shirt for Simon to
mangle,' for they had been arranging to live cheaply in a cottage on
the Continent, and Simon Fettle to do the washing. She could not help
laughing outright. But when the Old Buccaneer was down striding in the
battle, she took a pistol and descended likewise; and she used it, too,
and loaded again.

She had not to use it a second time. Kirby pulled the gentleman off his
horse, wounded in the thigh, and while dragging him to Countess Fanny
to crave her pardon, a shot intended for Kirby hit the poor gentleman
in the breast, and Kirby stretched him at his length, and Simon and he
disarmed the servant who had fired. One was insensible, one flying, and
those two on the ground. All in broad daylight; but so lonely is that
spot, nothing might have been heard of it, if at the end of the week the
postillion who had been bribed and threatened with terrible threats to
keep his tongue from wagging, had not begun to talk. So the scene of
the encounter was examined, and on one spot, carefully earthed over,
blood-marks were discovered in the green sand. People in the huts on the
hill-top, a quarter of a mile distant, spoke of having heard sounds of
firing while they were at breakfast, and a little boy named Tommy Wedger
said he saw a dead body go by in an open coach that morning; all bloody
and mournful. He had to appear before the magistrates, crying terribly,
but did not know the nature of an oath, and was dismissed. Time came
when the boy learned to swear, and he did, and that he had seen a
beautiful lady firing and killing men like pigeons and partridges; but
that was after Charles Dump, the postillion, had been telling the story.

Those who credited Charles Dump's veracity speculated on dozens of great
noblemen--and gentlemen known to be dying in love with Countess Fanny.
And this brings us to another family.

I do not say I know anything; I do but lay before you the evidence we
have to fix suspicion upon a notorious character, perfectly capable of
trying to thwart a man like Kirby, and with good reason to try, if she
had bewitched him to a consuming passion, as we are told.

About eleven miles distant, as the crow flie