“Horrible, horrible, sir!” he panted out, his anger taking away his breath and affecting his voice. “But we’ll avenge the poor fellow and kill the rascals when we come up with them, won’t we, sir? There’s my hand on it, anyway!”
I did not and could not say anything; no, I couldn’t; but you can pretty well imagine the oath I mentally registered.
Not so Garry O’Neil, though.
The Irishman’s face flamed with rage and anger. “Kill them, sor!” cried he, springing to his feet from the chair in which he had been seated alongside the colonel, whose injured limb he had been carefully attending to again all the while, his reddish beard and moustache bristling, and his steel-blue eyes flashing out veritable sparks, it seemed of fire. “Faith, killin’s too good for ’em, sure, the haythen miscreants! I’d boil ’em alive, sor, or roast ’em in the stoke-hold, begorrah, if I had me own way with ’em. I would, sor, so hilp me Moses, if all the howly saints, whose names be praised, an’ the blessed ould Pope, too, prayed me to spare ’em. Och, the murtherin’ bastes, the daymans, the divvles!”
He was almost beside himself in his rage and passionate invective. So much so, indeed, that Mr Stokes, despite his own hearty sympathy with the like cause, looked at the infuriated Irishman in great trepidation, for his face was flushed, and his hair seemed actually to stand on end, while his words tumbled out of his mouth pell-mell, jostling each other in their eagerness to find utterance.
The chief really fancied, I believe, that he had suddenly gone mad, as he literally fumed with fury.
After a few moments, however, Garry cooled down a bit, restraining himself by a violent effort, and he turned to his whilom patient with an apologetic air.
“Faith, sor, I fancied I had that divvle, your fri’nd, the markiss, sure, be the throat,” said he, with a feeble attempt at a grin and biting his lips to keep in his feelings while he dropped his arms, which he had been whirling round his head like a maniac only just before. “By the powers, wouldn’t I throttle the baste swately, if I had hould of him once in these two hands of mine!”
Colonel Vereker stretched out both his impulsively, and gripped those of Garry O’Neil.
“Heavens!” he cried, with tears in his eyes. “You are a white man, sir. I can’t say more than that, and I am proud to know you!”