h, moreover, a taste for dalliance, and my brave looks and martial
trappings did for her what her bold eyes had done for me. We were
becoming the sweetest friends, when, like an incarnate fiend, that
loutish clown, her lover, sweeps down upon us, and, with more jealousy
than wit, struck me--struck me, Harry Hogan! Soul of my body, think of
it, Cris!" And he grew red with anger at the recollection. "I took
him by the collar of his mean smock and flung him into the kennel--the
fittest bed he ever lay in. Had he remained there it had been well
for him; but the fool, accounting himself affronted, came up to demand
satisfaction. I gave it him, and plague on it--he's dead!"

"An ugly tale," was Crispin's sour comment.

"Ugly, maybe," returned Hogan, spreading out his palms, "but what choice
had I? The fool came at me, bilbo in hand, and I was forced to draw.'

"But not to slay, Hogan!"

"Twas an accident. Sink me, it was! I sought his sword-arm; but the
light was bad, and my point went through his chest instead."

For a moment Crispin stood frowning, then his brow cleared, as though he
had put the matter from him.

"Well, well--since he's dead, there's an end to it."

"Heaven rest his soul!" muttered the Irishman, crossing himself piously.
And with that he dismissed the subject of the great wrong that through
folly he had wrought--the wanton destruction of a man's life, and the
poisoning of a woman's with a remorse that might be everlasting.

"It will tax our wits to get you out of Penrith," said Crispin. Then,
turning and looking into the Irishman's great, good-humoured face--"I am
sorry you leave us, Hogan," he added.

"Not so am I," quoth Hogan with a shrug. "Such a march as this is little
to my taste. Bah! Charles Stuart or Oliver Cromwell, 'tis all one to me.
What care I whether King or Commonwealth prevail? Shall Harry Hogan be
the better or the richer under one than under the other? Oddslife, Cris,
I have trailed a pike or handled a sword in well-nigh every army in
Europe. I know more of the great art of war than all the King's generals
rolled into one. Think you, then, I can rest content with a miserable
company of horse when plunder is forbidden, and even our beggarly pay
doubtful? Whilst, should things go ill--as well they may, faith, with
an army ruled by parsons--the wage will be a swift death on field or
gallows, or a lingering one in the plantations, as fell to the lot of
those poor wretches Noll drove