"In there, and don't move on your life."

She pointed to a closet, but I shook my head.

"Not if I can help myself," I said. "I have just come out of a deep,
deep ditch, and I want to hear the splutter." I was whispering, too,
such was the woman's influence. She looked at me in amazement; she
tried to understand me; but she must have thought me out of my head,
for her lips were twitching pitifully and her hands trembling. "It's
the man in the next room," I whispered with a grin. "I put a handful of
medicine in his mouth. Wait! you'll hear him directly."

"Oh, I am so sorry for you," she cried, wringing her hands. "I am as
sorry for you as I am for myself."

"Then please take this bandage off and have my horse brought round."

"I can't! I can't! You're wounded. Go in the closet there."

"I'll go where you go, and I'll stay where you stay," I said; and I
must have been talking too loud, for she placed her hand on my
lips--and what should I do but hold it there and kiss it, the poor
little trembling hand!

And then there came from the next room the famous splutter for which I
had been waiting. The soldier made a noise as if he were drowning. He
gasped and coughed, and tried to catch his breath; he strangled and
lost it, and, when he caught it again, made a sound as if he had a
violent case of the whooping-cough. And all this time I was laughing
silently, and I came near strangling myself.

Jane Ryder was far from laughter. She was as cool as a cucumber. With
one quick movement, and with surprising strength, she had shoved me
into the closet. Then she flung the door wide open. As she did so the
guard cried out at the top of his voice that the prisoner had escaped.
And if ever a man was berated it was that big soldier who had fallen
asleep at the post of duty. "You drunken wretch!" she cried; "I knew
how it would be; I knew it!" He tried to make an explanation, but she
would not hear it. "Oh, I'll make you pay for this! Go--go and find
him, and if you fail take your cut-throats away from here and never let
me see them again. Report to my brother, and tell him how you carried
out your orders. You were to take them all without a struggle, but you
took only one, and you bring him here more dead than alive. He is
wandering about in the woods now, out of his head."

"But he shot one of my men. Haven't you any feeling for the man that'll
be cold and stiff by sun-up?"

"For the man, yes. You should have been the one to