, and saw him settled."

"Send him here!"

The negro came in, red-eyed, and hoarse with diseased lungs, and stood,
the wreck of a once gigantic and regular man.

"Gi' me a drink," he muttered; "I'm mos' dead wi' misery an cold."

"Tell this man what you did," Joe Johnson spoke; "you waited till you
saw the hat at the window, and fired, and fetched hat an' man to the
ground?"

Swallowing a thimbleful of McLane's brandy, the negro grunted "Blood!"
and looked tremblingly at his hands.

"What shape of hat was it?" McLane asked, shaking the negro savagely;
"was it like this?" shaping his own soft slouched hat to a point.

Black Dave looked, and shook his head.

"Not like that? Damnation!"

"No swearing, Colonel, before us conservatives," ventured Joe Johnson;
"what was the hat like, Dave? You're drunk."

"Like dis, I reckon." He modelled the crown into a bell form with his
finger.

Joe Johnson and McLane looked at each other a minute with mutual
accusation and confusion, and the former unceremoniously knocked the
negro down with his great fist.

"No gold of mine for this job, Joe Johnson," said Allan McLane; "in your
conservatism to save your own skin, you have let your tool kill an
innocent man."

He waved his hand, with all his strong will, towards the door, and shut
it in the kidnapper's face. Then, in haughty emotion, not like fear, but
disappointed pride and revenge, McLane sat down, glanced around him as
if to determine the next movement, and instinctively reached his hand
towards his Bible, which he opened at a marked page, and softly read,
till tears of baffled vindictiveness and counterfeited humility stopped
his voice, as follows:

"'To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
heaven: A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time
to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a
time to break down, and a time to build up ... God requireth that which
is past ... man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is
vanity.... a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his
portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?'"

When tears of pious vindictiveness had closed the reading, Colonel
McLane spread his pongee handkerchief on the bare floor, and knelt in
silent and comfortably assured prayer.

* * * * *

Black Dave had crawled into the room where Hulda partly heard these