rection of the draw-bridge, "how did you like the grip of them
black savages?--I say, Mitchell, old Nick will scarcely know the face
of you, it's so much altered by fright.--Did you see," turning to the
man in his rear, "how harum-scarum he looked, when the captain called
out to him to come off?"

"Hold your clapper, you spooney, and be damned to you!" exclaimed the
angry veteran.--"Had the Ingian fastened his paw upon your ugly neck as
he did upon mine, all the pitiful life your mother ever put into you
would have been spirited away from very fear; so you needn't brag."

"Sure, and if any of ye had a grain of spunk, ye would have fired, and
freed a fellow from the clutch of them hell thieves," muttered another
of the men at the litter. "All the time, the devil had me by the
throat, swinging his tommyhawk about my head, I saw ye dancing up and
down in the heavens, instead of being on your marrow bones on the
common."

"And didn't I want to do it?" rejoined the first speaker. "Ask Tom
Winkler here, if the captain didn't swear he'd cut the soul out of my
body if I even offered so much as to touch the trigger of my musket."

"Faith, and lucky he did," replied his covering man (for the ranks had
again joined), "since but for that, there wouldn't be at this moment so
much as a hair of the scalp of one of you left."

"And how so, Mr. Wiseacre?" rejoined his comrade.

"How so! Because the first shot that we fired would have set the devils
upon them in right earnest--and then their top-knots wouldn't have been
worth a brass farthing. They would have been scalped before they could
say Jack Robinson."

"It was a hell of a risk," resumed another of the litter men, "to give
four men a chance of having their skull pieces cracked open like so
many egg-shells, and all to get possession of a dead officer."

"And sure, you beast," remarked a different voice in a tone of anger,
"the dead body of the brave captain was worth a dozen such rotten
carcasses with all the life in them. What matter would it be if ye had
all been scalped?" Then with a significant half glance to the rear,
which was brought up by their commander, on whose arm leaned the
slightly wounded Johnstone, "Take care the captain doesn't hear ye
prating after that fashion, Will Burford."

"By Jasus," said a good-humoured, quaint looking Irishman, who had been
fixing his eyes on the litter during this pithy and characteristic
colloquy; "it sames to me, my boys, that