All unconscious of the fatal predicament into which Susan Jemima and she had got them Virgie looked up at her father from where she stood in the shelter of his arm.
"Daddy," she questioned, in a small, puzzled voice, "what are they going to do?"
"S-s-s-h," her father commanded as he patted her head comfortingly. "Everything will be all right, honey, I'm sure." But he had caught enough of the Corporal's altercation with Trooper O'Connell to make him see that things were very far from being what he wanted Virgie to suppose.
"Ye'd better be careful now," O'Connell said to Dudley. "Ye know well that if the pass is all right ye'll be getting yerself into a peck o' trouble."
"It isn't me that'll get in trouble," Dudley answered, with grim triumph. "It's someone else."
"Faith, then, who?" was the query.
"Morrison," snapped Dudley, with an ominous click of his teeth.
"The Colonel? Why?"
"Because he helped this spy escape! that's why. He killed my brother, shot him. Shot him down like a dog. But now I'm even with him."
He shook the pass under the trooper's nose and crowed with satisfaction.