“No; he looked astonished at first, and then he behaved to me like a gentleman, as I want you to behave to me, Hanson. You can if you like.”
“Yes, I can, my lad, and I—no, no; be off, and leave me. Let them flog me, and that will be the end of it. I’m too great a coward to shoot myself.”
“No, you are not,” said Dick quietly. “You’ve got pluck enough to do anything but be a coward. You haven’t pluck enough for that.”
“What! Is it to be a coward to make an end of one’s self?”
“You know that as well as I do. Now, understand this once for all. I came here entirely through my own efforts. No one prompted me; no one helped me. I’ve tried to do my duty since I’ve been a soldier, and it seemed to be the right thing to go and ask the general to let you off that degrading punishment. So I went, and, as I told you, he was surprised, but he was not angry; and he finished by saying that if you would give your word as a soldier that you would turn over a new leaf, he’d look over the past, and give you another chance by cancelling the sentence of flogging.”
The man’s face grew hard and drawn, and it was as if the little weak good left in him was making a desperate struggle against the bad and being crushed, when Dick took a step forward.
“Promise me, Hanson,” he said; “don’t let’s have our troop degraded before the people by one of ours being flogged.”
“I can’t promise, boy; I can’t,” groaned the prisoner desperately. “I’ve gone too far.”
“For the sake of the good old past, Hanson.”
“Do you want to drive me mad, boy?” roared the man fiercely.