until I am ready to draw nigher to
the settlements, you shall both have the benefit of carriage; if not,
never say that you did not get a friendly offer."

"Now, may the strong oppress me, and my sins be visited harshly on my
own head, if I forget your honesty, however slow it has been in showing
itself," cried Middleton, hastening to the side of the weeping Inez,
the instant he was released; "and, friend, I pledge you the honour of
a soldier, that your own part of this transaction shall be forgotten,
whatever I may deem fit to have done, when I reach a place where the arm
of government can make itself felt."

The dull smile, with which the squatter answered to this assurance,
proved how little he valued the pledge that the youth, in the first
revulsion of his feelings, was so free to make.

"Neither fear nor favour, but what I call justice, has brought me to
this judgment," he said, "do you that which may seem right in your eyes,
and believe that the world is wide enough to hold us both, without our
crossing each other's path again! If you ar' content, well; if you ar'
not content, seek to ease your feelings in your own fashion. I shall
not ask to be let up, when you once put me fairly down. And now, Doctor,
have I come to your leaf in my accounts. It is time to foot up the small
reckoning, that has been running on, for some time, atwixt us. With you,
I entered into open and manly faith; in what manner have you kept it?"

The singular felicity, with which Ishmael had contrived to shift the
responsibility of all that had passed, from his own shoulders to those
of his prisoners, backed as it was by circumstances that hardly admitted
of a very philosophical examination of any mooted point in ethics,
was sufficiently embarrassing to the several individuals, who were
so unexpectedly required to answer for a conduct which, in their
simplicity, they had deemed so meritorious. The life of Obed had been so
purely theoretic, that his amazement was not the least embarrassing at
a state of things which might not have proved so very remarkable had
he been a little more practised in the ways of the world. The worthy
naturalist was not the first by many, who found himself, at the precise
moment when he was expecting praise, suddenly arraigned, to answer for
the very conduct on which he rested all his claims to commendation.
Though not a little scandalised, at the unexpected turn of the
transaction, he was fain to make the best of