"Ready," the men answered.
"Then away, as if you were flying for your lives!"
The men put spurs to their mules, Alee gave the lash to my horse, and we started.
"Good-by, doctor," cried the Consul; "may you find your little son better when you reach home!"
I shouted some incoherent answers in a thick, loud voice, and in a few minutes more we were galloping across the plain outside the town.
The next two hours are a blank in my memory. In a kind of drunken stupor I rode on and on. The gray light deepened into the darkness of night, and the stars came out. Still we rode and rode. The moon appeared in the southern sky and rose into the broad whiteness of the stars overhead. Then consciousness came back to me, and with it came the first pangs of remorse. Through the long hours of that night ride one awful sight stood up constantly before my eyes. It was the sight of that dead body, stark and cold, lying within that little sanctuary behind me, white now with the moonlight, and silent with the night.
O Larby, Larby! You shamed me. You drove me from the world. You brought down your mother to the grave. And yet, and yet—must I absolve your murderer?
Father, I reached my home at last. At Gibraltar I telegraphed that I was coming, and at Dover I received a telegram in reply. Four days had intervened between the despatch of my message and the receipt of my wife's. Anything might have happened in that time, and my anxiety was feverish. Stepping on to the Admiralty Pier, I saw a telegraph boy bustling about among the passengers from the packet with a telegram in his hand.
"What name?" I asked.
He gave one that was not my own and yet sounded like it.