ody scenes,
hardens; and others, a few, who emerge from the ordeal with souls
passionately inclined to mercy and justice. Colonel John was of the
latter--a black swan. For at this moment, lying, and aware that he lay,
in some peril of his life, he was more troubled by the evil plight of
the helpless, whose cabins had given him a foster-mother, and made him
welcome in his youth, whose blood, too, he shared, than by his own
uncertain prospects.

William Bale, as was natural, was far from sharing this view. "May the
fire burn them!" he muttered, his ire excited by some prank of the
party below. "The Turks were polite beside these barefoot devils!"

"You'd have said the other thing at Bender," the Colonel answered,
turning his head.

"Ay, your honour," Bale returned; "a man never knows when he is well
off."

His master laughed. "I'd have you apply that now," he said.

"So I would if it weren't that I've a kind of a scunner of those black
bog-holes," Bale said. "To be planted head first 's no proper end of a
man, to my thinking; and if there's not something of the kind in these
ragamuffins' minds I'm precious mistaken.

"Pooh, man, you're frightening yourself," the Colonel answered. But the
room was dank and chill, the lake without lay lonely, and the picture
which Bale's words called up was not pleasant to the bravest. "It's a
civilised land, and they'd not think of it!"

"There's one, and that's the young lady's brother," Bale answered
darkly, "would not pull us out by the feet! I'll swear to that. Your
honour's too much in his way, if what they say in the house is true."

"Pooh!" the Colonel answered again. "We're of one blood."

"Cain and Abel," Bale said. "There's example for it." And he chuckled.

The Colonel scolded him anew. But having done so he could not shake off
the impression which the man's words had made on him. While he lived he
was a constant and an irritating check upon James McMurrough. If the
young man saw a chance of getting rid of that check, was he one to put
it from him? Colonel John's face grew long as he pondered the question;
he had seen enough of James to feel considerable doubt about the
answer. The fire on the height above the lake had died down, the one on
the strand was a bed of red ashes. The lake lay buried in darkness,
from which at intervals the cry of an owl as it moused along the shore
rose mournfully.

But Colonel John was not one to give way to fears that might be
baseles