one to be troubled about?"

"_If_ they did escape, then are we bound in duty to lay hands upon
them and deliver them again to their lord; for it is not seemly
that one of his quality should suffer a so insolent and high-handed
outrage from persons of their base degree."

There it was again. He could see only one side of it. He was
born so, educated so, his veins were full of ancestral blood that
was rotten with this sort of unconscious brutality, brought down
by inheritance from a long procession of hearts that had each done
its share toward poisoning the stream. To imprison these men
without proof, and starve their kindred, was no harm, for they were
merely peasants and subject to the will and pleasure of their lord,
no matter what fearful form it might take; but for these men to
break out of unjust captivity was insult and outrage, and a thing
not to be countenanced by any conscientious person who knew his
duty to his sacred caste.

I worked more than half an hour before I got him to change the
subject--and even then an outside matter did it for me. This was
a something which caught our eyes as we struck the summit of a
small hill--a red glow, a good way off.

"That's a fire," said I.

Fires interested me considerably, because I was getting a good
deal of an insurance business started, and was also training some
horses and building some steam fire-engines, with an eye to a paid
fire department by and by. The priests opposed both my fire and
life insurance, on the ground that it was an insolent attempt to
hinder the decrees of God; and if you pointed out that they did not
hinder the decrees in the least, but only modified the hard
consequences of them if you took out policies and had luck, they
retorted that that was gambling against the decrees of God, and was
just as bad. So they managed to damage those industries more
or less, but I got even on my Accident business. As a rule, a knight
is a lummox, and some times even a labrick, and hence open to pretty
poor arguments when they come glibly from a superstition-monger,
but even _he_ could see the practical side of a thing once in a while;
and so of late you couldn't clean up a tournament and pile the
result without finding one of my accident-tickets in every helmet.

We stood there awhile, in the thick darkness and stillness, looking
toward the red blur in the distance, and trying to make out the
meaning of a far-away murmur that rose and fell fitfully