e to pay me out
for any undue anxiety I might betray on his behalf; therefore I had to
admire the revolver in my turn, and even to acclaim it as a timely
acquisition. But either Uvo was not deceived, or else I was right as to
his morbid feeling about the weapon. He seemed unable to lay it down.
Sometimes he did so with apparent resolution, only to pick it up again
and sit twisting the empty chambers round and round, till they ticked
like the speedometer of a coasting bicycle. Once he slipped in one of
the cartridges. The colonel looked at me, and I perched myself on the
desk at Uvo's side. But the worst thing of all was the way his hand
trembled as he promptly picked that cartridge out again.

We had said not a word, but Uvo rattled on with glib vivacity and the
laugh that got upon my nerves. His new possession was his only theme. He
could no more drop the subject than the thing itself. It was the
revolver, the whole revolver, and nothing but the revolver for Uvo
Delavoye that night. He was childishly obsessed with its unpleasant
possibilities, but he treated them with a grim levity not unredeemed by
wit. His bloodthirsty prattle grew into a quaint and horrible harangue
eked out with quotations that stuck like burs. More than once I looked
to Colonel Cheffins for a disapproval which would come with more weight
from him than me; but decanter and syphon had been brought up soon after
his arrival, and he only sipped his whisky with an amused air that made
me wonder which of us was going daft.

"Talk about bare bodkins, otherwise hollow-ground razors!" cried Uvo,
emptying his glass. "I couldn't do the trick with cold steel if I tried;
but with a revolver you've only got to press the trigger and it does the
rest. Then--I wonder if you even live to hear the row?--then, Gilly,
it's a case of that 'big blue mark in his forehead and the back blown
out of his head!'"

"That wasn't a revolver," said I, for he had taught me to worship his
modern god of letters; "that was the Snider that 'squibbed in the
jungle.'"

Delavoye looked it up in his paper-covered copy.

"Quite right, Gilly!" said he. "But what price this from the very next
piece?

"'So long as those unloaded guns
We keep beside the bed,
Blow off, by obvious accident,
The lucky owner's head.'

"That's a bit more like it than the big blue mark, eh? And my gifted
author is the boy who can handle these little dears better than anybody
else in th