“Hell to your soul! but I’m glad to hear it. I owe you something, young man, and I like to pay my debts. If you’d spoken without flogging I might have had to bring you into Belfast with a whole skin. Now I’ll have you flogged, and you’ll speak afterwards. Tam, give the sergeant your belt. Sergeant, there’s a tree outside. Tie the prisoner up and flog him till he speaks, but don’t kill him. Leave enough life in him to last till we get him to Belfast, unless he speaks at once.”
“Yes, sir, but if your orders are so particular I’d rather you’d be present yourself to see how much he can stand.”
“I’m not going to leave my bottle,” said Captain Twinely, “to stand sentry over croppy carrion. Flog him till you lay his liver bare, sergeant, but don’t cut it out of him.”
The sergeant saluted, and marched Neal out of the house. His coat was dragged off him, his shirt stripped from his back, his hands tied to the tree which stood before Moylin’s house. He set his teeth and waited. The predominating feeling in his mind at first was not fear but furious anger. He had shrunk in terror from the near prospect of seeing Finlay die. He felt nothing now except a passionate desire for revenge.
The sergeant swung the trooper’s belt round his head, making it whistle through the air. Neal shivered and shrank, but the blow did not fall. The sergeant was in no hurry.
“You hear that,” he said, swinging the belt again. “Will you speak before I lay it on you? You shall have time to consider. Nobody shall say I hurried a prisoner. We’ll sing you a psalm, my dearly beloved, a sweet psalm to a most comfortable tune. At the end of the first verse I’ll give you another chance. If you don’t speak then——. Now Tarn, now lads all, tune up to the Ould Hunderd,
“‘There was a Presbyterian cat
Who loved her neighbour’s cream to sup;
She sanctified her theft with prayer
Before she went to drink it up.’”
The troopers, who appeared to have learned both tune and words since the night when the sergeant sang them in Dunseveric meeting-house, shouted lustily. Following their sergeant, they drawled the last line until it seemed to Neal as if they would never reach the end of it.
“Now, Mr. Neal Ward,” said the sergeant, “you’ve had a most comfortable and cheering psalm for the hour of your affliction. Will you speak, or——. Damn your soul, Tam, what are you at?”
The man next him lurched suddenly forward, clutching at the sergeant. In another instant there was a dull thud, and Donald Ward stood over the sergeant with a pistol, grasped by its barrel, in his hand. He had brought the butt of it down on the man’s skull. Two more of the yeomen fell almost at the same instant. The rest, three of them with wounds, fled, yelling, down the lane.