“Hush, don’t gabble, Sarde. You’ve played the man at last; I forgive you for firing too soon—I let you off the charge of cowardice in the field. Oh, you needn’t thank me—it’s for your wife’s sake. Yes, I let you off—I ask your pardon, sir. Oh, yes, why not?”
Within the fort a bugle was crying the terrible monotonous repetitions of the General Assembly, and men were yelling, as they ran, of wounded patients shut up in the blazing house. “The fort’s on fire. The fort’s on fire,” Sarde moaned.
La Mancha clutched Sarde’s arm to steady himself as he reeled backwards faint with pain from his wound.
“Those refugees,” he explained; “half-breeds in the guard room with a red hot stove. I warned them. Look, the gate house is on fire, the gate is blocked with flames, the only gate, and the fire will spread all round the buildings! All those people going to be burned to death unless we can cut a road through the stockade—you’ve hit my shoulder—I can’t use the axe. But you”—he shook the officer with frantic violence—“a Canadian, a born axeman— Do you hear? Save the garrison or they’ll burn to death! Take that axe!”
The Canadian sprang forward, the axe became a live thing in his hands; the gleaming blade flamed in red air, buried itself in quivering timber, then swung again, and lit, and swung again in a whirl of splinters.
La Mancha sat down in the snow, his blood-drenched hand upon the wound, his body rocking to the steady swing of the axe, though he could hardly see his enemy now, because of the red smoke curling between the timbers.
“Good man!” he gasped, “you are a man at last! You’ll save the garrison, you’ll get promoted, you’ll win back that lady’s love-you’re winning back your honor! Strike, man—strike!”
It is well known to the two hundred thousand readers of this magazine that its bald-headed editor often pulls his hair on the platform. He boarded the cars one day and slung his big valise between two seats and sat down by a drummer. The drummer looked at the valise and then at the bald-headed man and bluntly asked, “Are you a traveling man, sir?” “Yes, sir,” was the reply. “What line of goods are you selling?” queried the drummer. “Sweetened wind,” was the answer. “Oh, you are!” said the drummer; “preacher or lecturer?”—Robert L. Taylor.
A ROYAL RESIDENCE.
By James Henry Stevenson.