ng; you deserve
it better than the Cossacks. Keep it as long as you like; it will always
bring you a fifty, if you get hard up. And take _this_ too." He put his
hand into the breast of his uniform; but drew it back quickly. "No: it
shall stay with me while I live."

His tone and manner were just the same as if he had met with a heavy
fall, out hunting, and were answering some good-natured friend who had
stopped to pick him up.

The trooper took the ring; but he lingered still. Royston saw a knot of
the enemy sweeping down on them, like ravens on a stag wounded to the
death; his voice resumed its wonted accent of irresistible command.

"Did you hear what I said? I told you to go. Those devils will be down
on us in less than a minute. I have not fired one barrel of my revolver,
and I'm good for one or two of them yet."

The habit of obedience, more than the instinct of self-preservation,
made Davis mount and ride away without another word. He looked back,
though, as he did so. He heard three distinct reports from Keene's
revolver: two of the enemy's skirmishers dropped to the shots, and the
third wavered in his saddle; the rest closed round the fallen man with
leveled lances. The stout sergeant looked back no more; but he set his
teeth hard, and turned out of his way to encounter a stray Russian, and
laid the foeman's face open from eyebrow to lip, with an awful
blasphemy. The spot where Royston fell was so near to the British lines
that those who slaughtered him dared not stay for plunder. Half an hour
later, Davis and two more volunteers went out and brought in the mangled
body of the best swordsman in the Light Brigade.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Not dead yet!

Though the bloody Muscovite spearmen thought they had left a corpse
behind them, and though the surgeons who examined him decided that he
could not survive the night, the obstinate vitality in Royston Keene
still lingered on, refusing to yield to wounds that might have drained
the life out of three strong men. It seemed as if some strange doom were
upon him, such as was laid on the Black Slave in the _Arabian Nights_,
loved by the enchantress-queen; or a Durindarte in the old romance,
where the tortured spirit, enthralled by potent spells, was withheld for
a season from departure, though its tenement was all shattered and
ruined. His case from the first was utterly hopeless; and his bodily
helplessness at times almost resembled catalepsy; yet his faculties