ere safe at home."

She stopped short and turned upon him. "Look here! what are you going to
do now? It's a pretty mean sort of business this you've taken to,
sneaking round your old friends to do them all the harm you can."

"It's the first time I knew that you'd ever been a friend of mine, Ann."
He said this in a sort of sad aside, and then: "You've sense enough to
know that when a man shoots another man he's got to be found and shut up
for the good of the country and for his own good too. It's the kindest
thing that can be done to a man sometimes, shutting him up in jail." He
said this last quite as much by way of explanation to himself as to her.

"Or hanging him," she suggested sarcastically.

He paused a moment. "I hope he won't come to that."

"But you'll do all you can to catch him, knowing that it's like to come
to that. What's the good of hoping?"

He had only said it to soothe her. He had another self-justification.

"I can only do what I have to do: it is not me that will decide whether
Walker dies or not. At any rate, it ain't no use to justify it to you.
It's natural that you should look upon me as an enemy just now; but all
the police in the country are more your enemies than I am. You've got
him off now, I suppose; however you've done it I don't pretend to know.
It'll be some one else that catches him if he's caught."

She wondered if he was only saying this to try her, or if he really
believed that Markham had gone far; yet there was small chance even then
that he would cease to watch her the next night and the next. He had
shown both resolution and diligence in this business--qualities, as far
as she knew, so foreign to his character that she smiled bitterly.

"A nice sort of thing religion is, to get out of the mire yourself and
spend your time kicking your old friends further in!"

Now the fugitive had been never a friend to Toyner, except in the sense
that he had done more than any one else to lead him into low habits and
keep him there. He had, in fact, been his greatest enemy; but that,
according to Toyner's new notions, was the more reason for counting him
a friend, not the less.

"Well, I grant 'tain't a very grand sort of business being constable,"
he said; "to be a preacher 'ud be finer perhaps; but this came to hand
and seemed the thing for me to do. It ain't kicking men in the mire to
do all you can to stop them making beasts of themselves."

He stood idling in the moonlight as h