“I don’t want nobody to take up for me”
“Tut, tut, my boys,” he said, with pleasant firmness, and led Hugh away, and when General Willoughby would have followed, the colonel nodded him back with a smile, and Hugh was seen no more that night. The guests left with gayety, smiles, and laughter, and every one gave the stranger a kindly good-by. Again Harry went with him to his room and the lad stopped again under the crossed swords.
“You fight with ’em?”
“Yes, and with pistols.”
“I’ve never had a pistol. I want to learn how to use them.”
Harry looked at him searchingly, but the boy’s face gave hint of no more purpose than when he first asked the same question.
“All right,” said Harry.
The lad blew out his candle, but he went to his window instead of his bed. The moonlight was brilliant—among the trees and on the sleeping flowers and the slow run of the broad river, and it was very still out there and very lovely, but he had no wish to be out there. With wind and storm and sun, moon and stars, he had lived face to face all his life, but here they were not the same. Trees, flowers, house, people had reared some wall between him and them, and they seemed now to be very far away. Everybody had been kind to him—all but Hugh. Veiled hostility he had never known before and he could not understand. Everybody had surely been kind, and yet—he turned to his bed, and all night his brain was flashing to and fro between the reel of vivid pictures etched on it in a day and the grim background that had hitherto been his life beyond the hills.