"Did you never like or respect any one?" said a quiet voice from the window where Alec still was leaning.
Before Starlight had made the light reply that was on his lips as he turned his smiling face to the window, the mocking, sneering voice of Middance, who was striving to emulate his leader in cynicism, said—
"That shows you don't know much o' we wicked uns, or you wouldn't ask that question. Don't you know that the wust of us," here the blackguard assumed what he thought was a religious snuffle, "the very wust, al'ys loves one pussun. Starlight loves his mother."
Swift as the swoop of an eagle Starlight turned on the fellow, and, for the first time in the memory of the gang, livid with passion, struck him a crashing blow full on his jeering mouth. Middance fell like a log, for although Starlight was not tall his muscles and sinews were of steel. Standing over the prostrate man, Starlight said, in a voice that literally quivered with rage—
"Dare to mention her name again, and, as I live, I'll strangle you!"
Middance did not move or speak: he was awed by Starlight's unusual passion, for there was something grand about the anger of this generally unmoved man.
Starlight soon regained command of himself, and, as though ashamed of his display of emotion and anger, he moved to the window where Alec stood astonished at the sudden scene, and in his customary low tone, he said—
"I have surprised you, I see. You think a man is all good or all bad. Ah, wait a few years longer, and you will learn to take wider views. Men are many-sided cattle."
And then, as though to correct any false impression he might have created as to his possessing more than one side himself, he crossed the room and said something, in the same melodious voice, to one of the men, so blasphemous that, accustomed though he was to the not too choice language of a station, Alec flushed hot, as if the very hearing of it seared him.
Shortly after supper the men went off to bed. They did not sit smoking late that night, for a feeling of restraint was upon them after the unusual scene of that evening. Crosby had come in some time before, looking, Alec thought, eager and excited; he said in answer to one of the men that he had seen the boy go towards Lingan's and had then come in. Alec dare not court the attention of the men by crossing the room and speaking to Martin, and he had to wait till Starlight had put out the light and sprung into his hammock, which he had let down from the hooks in the ceiling to which it was fastened in the daytime.