"Let it off to him, Alister; he will give you fairer play than your small brother; he understands you better than I."
"But I could not let it off to him that way!"
"Then that is not a good way. The justice that, even in imagination, would tear and destroy and avenge, may be justice, but it is devil's justice. Come, begin now, and tell me all quietly-as if you had read it in a book."
"Word for word, then, with all the imprecations!" returned Alister, a little cooler; and Ian was soon in possession of the story.
"Now what do you think, Ian?" said the chief, ending a recital true to the very letter, and in a measure calm, but at various points revealing, by the merest dip of the surface, the boiling of the floods beneath.
"You must send him the head, Alister," answered Ian.
"Send-what-who-I don't understand you, Ian!" returned the chief, bewildered.
"Oh, well, never mind!" said Ian. "You will think of it presently!"
And therewith he turned his face to the wall, as if he would go to sleep.
It had been a thing understood betwixt the brothers, and that from so far back in the golden haze of childhood that the beginning of it was out of sight, that, the moment one of them turned his back, not a word more was to be said, until he who thus dropped the subject, chose to resume it: to break this unspoken compact would have been to break one of the strands in the ancient bond of their most fast brotherhood. Alister therefore went at once to his room, leaving Ian loving him hard, and praying for him with his face to the wall. He went as one knowing well the storm he was about to encounter, but never before had he had such a storm to meet.