s before I can
decide what my duty is. What will you swear to?"

"All this," said Hanky, in a voice husky with passion, "shall be reported
to the King."

"I intend to report every word of it; but that is not the point: the
question is what you gentlemen will swear to?"

"Very well. I will settle it thus. We will swear that the prisoner is
the poacher we met on Thursday night, and that he is also a foreign
devil: his wearing the forbidden dress; his foreign accent; the
foot-tracks we found in the snow, as of one coming over from the other
side; his obvious ignorance of the Afforesting Act, as shown by his
having lit a fire and making no effort to conceal his quails till our
permit shewed him his blunder; the cock-and-bull story he told us about
your orders, and that other story about his having killed a foreign
devil--if these facts do not satisfy you, they will satisfy the King that
the prisoner is a foreign devil as well as a poacher."

"Some of these facts," answered George, "are new to me. How do you know
that the foot-tracks were made by the prisoner?"

Panky brought out his note-book and read the details he had noted.

"Did you examine the man's boots?"

"One of them, the right foot; this, with the measurements, was quite
enough."

"Hardly. Please to look at both soles of my own boots; you will find
that those tracks were mine. I will have the prisoner's boots examined;
in the meantime let me tell you that I was up at the statues on Thursday
morning, walked three or four hundred yards beyond them, over ground
where there was less snow, returned over the snow, and went two or three
times round them, as it is the Ranger's duty to do once a year in order
to see that none of them are beginning to lean."

He showed the soles of his boots, and the Professors were obliged to
admit that the tracks were his. He cautioned them as to the rest of the
points on which they relied. Might they not be as mistaken, as they had
just proved to be about the tracks? He could not, however, stir them
from sticking to it that there was enough evidence to prove my father to
be a foreign devil, and declaring their readiness to depose to the facts
on oath. In the end Hanky again fiercely accused him of trying to shield
the prisoner.

"You are quite right," said George, "and you will see my reasons
shortly."

"I have no doubt," said Hanky significantly, "that they are such as would
weigh with any man of ordinary feeling