morrow. Remember you may take life, but you cannot give it
back again. Oh, this is too horrible--to kill him now, like this."

He felt, while he spoke, Finlay's clasp tighten on him. He felt the
wretched man cover his hands with kisses, mumble, and slobber over them.
There was silence for a while when Neal ceased speaking. Then Donald
Ward said--

"Neal, you had better go outside. This is no work for a boy. It is, as
you say, horrible. To inflict death is horrible, but it is sometimes
just. If ever it is just for man to shed the blood of his brother man it
is just to shed James Finlay's. He has broken oaths, has brought death
on men, has made women widows and children fatherless; has wrecked the
happiness of homes. He has done these things for the sake of gain, for
money counted out to him as the priests counted money out to Judas."

It was impossible to plead his cause any more. Moylin pushed open the
iron door of the vault. Neal dragged his hands from Finlay's grasp, and
crawled out. He heard the door clang behind him, shut fast again upon
the broken, terrified wretch and his judges--relentless men of iron, the
northern iron.

No sound reached him from the vault. Save for the occasional belated
cawing of some rooks in the trees which shadowed the graveyard, no sound
reached him at all. He sat down among the nettles, the brambles, and the
rank grass and burst into tears.

CHAPTER XI

The paroxysm of tears swept Neal as the Atlantic waves sweep foaming and
furious over Rackle Roy. Then it passed and left him panting, shaking
with recurrent sobs, and a prey to an hysterical dread of hearing some
sound from the vault beside him. He sat absolutely motionless. He
hardly dared to breathe. He waited in horrible expectation of hearing
something. He listened intent, agonised, feeling that if a sound reached
him he would cry aloud and on the instant become a raving madman. The
scene inside the vault rose to his imagination. Far more really than he
saw the dim church and the trees, he saw Finlay grovelling on the
ground and the stern men crouching over him. He saw a knife gleam in the
lantern's light. He shut his eyes, as if by shutting them he could
blot out the pictures of his imagination. He waited to hear a shriek,
a smothered cry, a groan, the laboured breath of struggling men, the
splash of blood. The suspense became an agony. He rose to his feet and
fled.

He stumbled over a grave, and fell headlong, bruising