"And pray who is he?" asked Dudley.
"Oh, the man that betrayed me once!" replied his companion. "A storekeeper I trusted, and he sold me. He killed himself that night, and he knows it. So he's only waiting till I've got leisure, then we'll settle accounts."
"Then you mean you'll kill him," said Dudley, guessing the man's meaning, though not very certain.
"To be sure," answered the other. "He shall go out of the colony one day soon. Come, I must have another biscuit."
"As many as you like," answered Dudley, "and take some with you, if you please; but if you've got any water in that bottle, you shall give me some, for I am as thirsty as you are hungry."
"Ay, there's water in it, sure enough, now," replied the other, unslinging the gourd and giving it to him. "There was something better in it not long ago--real Bengal brandy, but that was gone a great deal too soon. Lord! it's just like a dream; how I drank it up; but such as it is, you may have it."
Dudley assuaged his thirst, and then returned the man the gourd, saying, "That is better than brandy, and take my word for it, peace is bettor than revenge. Revenge is like that brandy you talk of: you take it to assuage a thirst, and it leaves a more consuming thirst than ever. From the moment you have had it, a burning will seize upon your heart, which nought will ever cool, you will die parched up with crime upon crime, without peace in the present, peace in the past, or peace in the future."
The man gazed at him with a look of utter astonishment. "No, I shan't," he replied. "I shall be hanged. That's my death. I always intended it."
"But did you ever consider," asked Dudley, "that this life is not all; that there is another beyond this world, to which the pains or the pleasures of this life are nothing?"
"Are you a methodist parson, young man?" said the other, knitting his brows at him.