“Only shpaking to your brother. I heard you. Only, eh? I only guess what you said. Ye’re encouraging him in his wickedness and his rising against the law. Nic, my boy, you’ve behaved very badly; you’re a disobedient son, and a bad citizen, and I ought to be very angry; but somehow I can’t, for I like the spirit in you.”
“But you wouldn’t have had me betray that poor fellow, whom I believe to be innocent, Lady O’Hara,” cried Nic, in choking voice, “and give him up to be flogged, and sent back to the chain gang?”
“Bedad, I wouldn’t,” cried the lady, turning very Irish, and dragging him to her, she gave him a sounding kiss. “I’d have called ye no boy of mine if ye had, and your mother wid the gyurls say the same, don’t ye, my dears?”
“Oh yes,” came in chorus.
“But it’s all very wrong, Nic; I say so who am the governor’s wife; and this black sheep-thayving convict of yours’ll be coming and killing us all in our beds.”
Chapter Forty One.
Right Wins.
One idea uppermost in Nic’s mind was that he must go and warn Frank Mayne that his father was back, that the governor was at the station with two men, that—as he had since heard—a party of mounted police were coming up to scour the country for escaped convicts, and of course they would search for him as well.