his
people.

"This is more than I could have expected, Joyce!" he said, as much in
sorrow as in anger. "I should have as soon looked for the desertion of
old Pliny as that of Mike!"

"It is extr'or'nary, sir; but one is never safe without in-and-in
discipline. A drill a week, and that only for an hour or two of a
Saturday afternoon, captain Willoughby, may make a sort of country
militia, but it will do nothing for the field. 'Talk of enlisting men
for a year, serjeant Joyce,' said old colonel Flanker to me, one day in
the last war--'why it will take a year to teach a soldier how to eat.
Your silly fellows in the provincial assemblies fancy because a man has
teeth, and a stomach, and an appetite, that he knows how to _eat_;
but eating is an _art_, serjeant; and military eating above all
other branches of it; and I maintain a soldier can no more learn how to
eat, as a soldier, the colonel meant, your honour, than he can learn to
plan a campaign by going through the manual exercise.' For my part,
captain Willoughby, I have always thought it took a man his first five
years' enlistment to learn how to obey orders."

"I had thought that Irishman's heart in the right place, Joyce, and
counted as much on him as I did on you!"

"On me, captain Willoughby!" answered the serjeant, in a tone of
mortification. "I should think your honour would have made some
difference between your old orderly--a man who had served thirty years
in your own regiment, and most of the time in your own company, and a
bit of a wild Hibernian of only ten years' acquaintance, and he a man
who never saw a battalion paraded for real service!"

"I see my error now, Joyce; but Michael had so much blundering honesty
about him, or seemed to have, that I have been his dupe. It is too
late, however, to repine; the fellow is gone; it only remains to
ascertain the manner of his flight. May not Joel have undone the
fastenings of the door, and let him and the Indian escape together, in
common with the rest of the deserters?"

"I secured that door, sir, with my own hands, in a military manner, and
know that it was found as I left it. The Rev. Mr. Woods' bed seems to
have been disturbed; perhaps that may furnish a clue."

A clue the bed did furnish, and it solved the problem. The bed-cord was
removed, and both the sheets and one of the blankets were missing. This
directed the inquiry to the windows, one of which was not closed
entirely. A chimney stood near th