"For what?" replied the prisoner. "Oh God, do you ask me, brother?"
"For your own bosom then? Ay, can we do no more? And the lawyers, then, can give you no hope, not even for money?"
"None, none: I am condemned already—The knife, the knife!"
"The dream's out!" said Oran, with what seemed a laugh. "When I was a little boy, and the rest were but babes about me, I dreamed, one night, that there were seven of us together, though there were but four of them born, and that I killed them. And so they say I have indeed! Well, boy, I have killed you, as well as the rest, and now I am alone. You shall have the knife—yet be not in a hurry. Something may turn up: Sir Guy may demand a military trial—But no, I am lying to my own heart: you must die, Hyland, you must die! for even I cannot help you."
"The knife will help me."
"Take it!" said the refugee, with a voice so loud as to show his feelings had got the better of his caution,—and indeed his accents betrayed the most vehement agitation; "take it!" he cried, flinging it against the window with a motion so reckless or perturbed, that it did not even strike the bars, but coming in contact with the stone framework, it rebounded and fell, like the file, to the ground below. "Ha ha! you see, brother! there is no hope for you,—no, not even in the knife!"
"Brother!" cried Hyland, "you can help me yet."
"It is false!" said the other: "my band is broken, my body bleeding, and now, if they would send a boy against me, why a boy might take me."
"Listen, brother—it is my dying prayer," said Hyland, "and nothing else can be done. Before midnight of the coming day—perhaps earlier—I shall be a doomed man—doomed to death—doomed to the gallows? Brother, don't let me die on the gallows! Where is Staples? He can send a bullet through the eye of a leaping buck; I have seen him kill a night-hawk on the wing. Brother, you will be my heir—give him what you will, give him all, and let him come to-morrow night on the square, and when he sees a candle held at this window, let him fire at it,—let him aim well,—at the candle, brother, at the candle! Oh heaven! do you not hear me?"
"I hear," said Oran. "A wild freak that, but good! ay, boy, good, good, good! But Staples—ha, ha! Choose another: take the whole band; one will be as ready to serve you as another."