“Why, you are; and you feel your guilt. Look at you shivering, and white as you are.”
“Well, aren’t it enough to make any man shiver and look white, knowing as that poor lad’s lying dead at the bottom of that big hole?”
Joe groaned, and took hold of the rope’s end.
“How could he have undone the knot, swinging as he was in the air? You know well enough it was not properly tied.”
“But it was!” cried Hardock, indignantly. “I tied it carefully mysen, just as I should have done if I’d been going down.”
“Don’t use that knot again, then,” said Joe, bitterly. “I wish—oh! how I wish you had let me go down instead.”
“What?” cried the man. “Why, you’d ha’ been drowned i’stead o’ he.”
“I wish I had been. It would have been better than having to go to the Colonel to tell him—I can’t do it!” cried the boy, passionately. “I can’t do it!”
“Then come along o’ me, my lad.”
“Where?”