r precautions against a raid, that I should
depend upon them for our lives."

"Well, we'll play the game out, but I'm not very hopeful," said
Cochrane. "Of course, we must keep the best face we can before the
women. I see that Tippy Tilly is as good as his word, for those five
niggers and the two brown Johnnies must be the men he speaks of.
They all ride together and keep well up, but I can't see how they are
going to help us."

"I've got my pistol back," whispered Belmont, and his square chin and
strong mouth set like granite. "If they try any games on the women, I
mean to shoot them all three with my own hand, and then we'll die with
our minds easy."

"Good man!" said Cochrane, and they rode on in silence. None of them
spoke much. A curious, dreamy, irresponsible feeling crept over them.
It was as if they had all taken some narcotic drug--the merciful anodyne
which Nature uses when a great crisis has fretted the nerves too far.
They thought of their friends and of their past lives in the
comprehensive way in which one views that which is completed. A subtle
sweetness mingled with the sadness of their fate. They were filled with
the quiet serenity of despair.

"It's devilish pretty," said the Colonel, looking about him. "I always
had an idea that I should like to die in a real, good, yellow London
fog. You couldn't change for the worse."

"I should have liked to have died in my sleep," said Sadie.
"How beautiful to wake up and find yourself in the other world!
There was a piece that Hetty Smith used to say at the College: 'Say not
good-night, but in some brighter world wish me good-morning.'"

The Puritan aunt shook her head at the idea. "It's a terrible thing to
go unprepared into the presence of your Maker," said she.

"It's the loneliness of death that is terrible," said Mrs. Belmont.
"If we and those whom we loved all passed over simultaneously, we should
think no more of it than of changing our house."

"If the worst comes to the worst, we won't be lonely," said her husband.
"We'll all go together, and we shall find Brown and Headingly and Stuart
waiting on the other side."

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. He had no belief in survival
after death, but he envied the two Catholics the quiet way in which they
took things for granted. He chuckled to think of what his friends in
the Cafe Cubat would say if they learned that he had laid down his life
for the Christian faith. Sometimes it am