hat James Hope would be
caught and would then and there be hanged. Finlay had betrayed many men,
had earned the basest wages a man can earn--the wages of a spy. He knew
that his victims went to flogging and death, but he never watched them
flogged, he never saw them die. He even bargained never to stand in a
witness box. The results, the inevitable issues of his betrayals, were
never immediately before his eyes. Between him and the punishment of
his victims there was always some space of time spent in prison, some
appearance of a legal trial, some pretence of a just judgment. He was
able, with that strange power of self-deception which most men possess,
to conceal from himself that it was his information which led to the
brutalities which followed it. If James Finlay had been obliged himself
to execute the men whose execution his testimony secured; if he had been
forced to lay the lash on quivering flesh or fit the noose round the
necks of living men; it is likely that no bribe would have bought him,
that sheer cowardice and an instinctive horror of death and pain would
have saved him, as no consideration of honour and truth did, from the
extreme baseness of an informer's trade. Here lay part of the meaning
of his terrified desire for Hope's escape. He could not bear to see men
hanged before the door of his own house, or hear with his ears their
shrieks under the lash.

But there was more behind this feeling than utter cowardice. He knew
James Hope, knew him intimately, though he had known him only for a
short time. Like Neal Ward he had walked with Hope along the roads and
lanes of County Antrim, had heard him talking, had seen--as no man, even
the basest, could fail to see--the wonderful purity and unselfishness
of Hope's character. James Finlay had sold his own honour, but there
remained this much good in him, he refused to sell Hope's life. God,
reckoning all the evil and baseness of James Finlay's treachery and
greed, will no doubt set on the other side of the account the fact that
even Finlay recognised high goodness when he saw it, that he did not
betray Hope, that he grovelled on the floor before a man whom he hated
for the chance of saving Hope from what seemed certain death.

Neal pushed Finlay aside and stepped forward. He took five of the cases
of cartridges--three under his right arm two under his left. Hope raised
the other three. Then, picking up a bundle from a corner, he said--

"There is more gear he