e French
sloop that's in the bay----"

"Faith, and you're wasting the little breath that is left you," the
ruffian answered, irritated rather than moved by the other's calmness.
"It's to take or leave. I told the men a heretic had no soul to make,
but----"

"God forgive you!" Colonel John said--and was silent; for he saw that
remonstrance would not help him, nor prayer avail. The man's mind was
made up, his heart steeled. For a brief instant, something, perhaps
that human fear which he had so often defied, clutched Colonel John's
heart. For a brief instant human weakness had its way with him, and he
shuddered--in the face of the bog, in the face of such an end as this.
Then the mist passed from his eyes, if not from the landscape; the
gracious faith that was his returned to him: he was his grave,
unyielding self again. He took Bale's hand and begged his forgiveness.
"Would I had never brought you!" he said. "Why did I, why did I? Yet,
God's will be done!"

Bale did not seem able to speak. His jaw continued to work, while his
eyes looked sideways at Og. Had the Irishman known his man, he would
have put himself out of reach, armed as he was.

"But I will appeal for you to the priest!" Colonel John continued; "he
may yet prevail with them to spare you."

"He will not!" O'Sullivan Og said naively.

CHAPTER XII

THE SEA MIST

Father O'Hara looked at the two prisoners, and the tears ran down his
face. He was the man whom Colonel Sullivan and Bale had overtaken on
their way to Tralee. In spite of his life and his wrongs, he was a
merciful man, and with all his heart he wished that, if he could do no
good, God had been pleased to send him another way through the mist.
Not that life was to him aught but a tragedy at any time, on whichever
road he took. What but a tragedy could it be to a man bred at Douay and
reared on Greek, and now condemned to live in loneliness and squalor
among unlettered, unwashed creatures; to one who, banned by the law,
moved by night, and lurked in some hiding-place by day, and, waking or
sleeping, was ever in contact with the lawless and the oppressed, the
wretched and the starving--whose existence was spent in shriving,
christening, burying among the hills and bogs?

Yet, even in such a life this was a tragedy beyond the common. And--"What
can I do?" he cried. "_Non mihi, domine, culpa!_ Oh, what can I do?"

"You can do nothing, father," O'Sullivan Og said grimly. "They're
hereti