He should have been welcome to them as a dying souvenir; but if I succeeded in only half-killing him, or he in half-killing me, how about the future? I should be showing my hand to him, by which he would profit; whereas, unknown to him, I now knew his, and might easily foil his designs.
Such calculations ran rapidly through my mind, though I considered them with a coolness that in after-thought surprises me. The incidents that I had lately encountered—combined with angry hatred of this plausible villain—had made me fierce, cold and cruel. I was no longer myself; and, wicked as it may appear, I could not control my longings for vengeance.
I needed a friend to advise me. Who could I make the confidant of my terrible secret?
Surely my ears were not deceiving me? No; it was the voice of my old school-fellow, Charley Gallagher. I heard it outside, and recognised the ring of his merry laugh. A detachment of rifles had just entered the fort with Charley at their head. In another instant we had “embraced.”
What could have been more opportune? Charley had been my “chum” at college—my bosom companion. He deserved my confidence, and almost upon the instant, I made known to him the situation of affairs.
It required much explanation to remove his incredulity; he was disposed to treat the whole thing as a joke—that is, the conspiracy against my life. But the rifle shot was real, and Black Jake was by to confirm my account of it: so that my friend was at length induced to take a serious view of the matter.
“Bad luck to me!” said he, in Irish accent: “it’s the quarest case that ever came accrast your humble frind’s experience. Mother o’ Moses! the fellow must be the divil incarnate. Geordie, my boy, have ye looked under his instip?”
Despite the name and “brogue,” Charley was not a Hibernian—only the son of one. He was a New-Yorker by birth, and could speak good English when he pleased; but from some freak of eccentricity or affectation, he had taken to the brogue, and used it habitually, when among friends, with all the rich garniture of a true Milesian, fresh from the “sod.”
He was altogether an odd fellow, but with a soul of honour, and a heart true as steel. He was no dunce either, and the man above all others upon whose coat tail it would not have been safe to “trid.” He was already notorious for having been engaged in two or three “affairs,” in which he had played both principal and second, and had earned the bellicose appellation of “Fighting Gallagher.” I knew what his advice would be before asking it—“Call the schoundrel out by all manes.”
I stated the difficulty as to my reasons for challenging Ringgold.