"A prisoner under escort, in irons—condemned, or at least intended, to be shot—and all the while under parole! My friend, that must surely have been a strange kind of parole!"
"It was, and, saving your reverence, a cursed dirty kind. But it sufficed for my kinsman, as I know to my cost. For with the help of the partidas I rescued him, close to the frontier; and he—like the fool, or like the noble gentleman he was—declined his salvation, released the escort (which we had overpowered), shook hands with us, and rode forward to his death."
"A brave story."
"You would say so, did you know the whole of it. There is no man alive whose hand I could grasp as proudly as I grasped his at the last: and no other, alive or dead, of whom I could say, with the same conviction, that he made me at once think worse of myself and better of human nature."
"He seems, then, to have a mania for improving his fellow-men; for," said my guide, still pausing with the candle aloft and twinkling on his spectacles, "I assure you he has been trying to make a Lutheran of me!"
Wholly incredulous as I was, this took me fairly between wind and water.
"Did he," I stammered, "did he happen to mention the Scarlet Woman?"
"Several times: though (in justice to his delicacy, I must say it) only in his delirium."
"His delirium?"
"He has been ill; almost desperately ill. A case of sunstroke, I believe. Do I understand that you believe sufficiently to follow me?"
"I cannot say that I believe. Yet if it be not Captain Alan McNeill, and if for some purpose which—to be frank with you—I cannot guess, I am being walked into a trap, you may take credit to yourself that it has been well, nay excellently, invented. I pay you that compliment beforehand, and for my kinsman's sake, or for the sake of his memory, I accept the risk."