“Of us both, sir. You make me fear I have misplaced my confidence.”
“In the richness of the bone you proposed to pick? Very possibly you have.”
They were slowly pacing their horses all this time side by side. The road was utterly deserted, the prospect of the dreariest. A straggle of withered thorns, running darkly up the slope of a low hill to the left, alone broke the almost treeless desolation.
“Ride on, sir, ride on,” said the stranger in an offended voice. “Better my own fearful company than a comrade so mistrustful.”
He pulled on his rein and fell back. The other did the same.
“Great God!” cried the stranger. “Who’s this?”
Almost without a sound, it seemed, a horseman had broken from the shelter of the thorns, and drawn up in the middle of the track, barring their way. In the same instant, the clerical gentleman, who had fallen again behind, whipped a pistol from his skirt-pocket and shot his companion’s horse dead. The bullet entered behind the shoulder, and the beast, doubling up its forelegs, pitched and collapsed. Its rider, flung over its head, gathered his wits with agility, and sat up to encounter the vision of a couple of rascal faces looking down upon him.
“Do me the justice to attest,” he said to the pseudo-parson, “that I never for a moment believed in you.”
The other beamed over him, his pistol still smoking in his hand.
“And be damned to your scepticism!” said he. “For may I never launch soul on its flight again if I am not what I look, a broken hedge-parson.”