sight of me, when I slipped out, would sober him. And, by ---, it
did! For his eyes bulged out of his head and got fixed there; his jaw
dropped; he tried to strike at me with a hunting crop he was carrying,
and then he uttered an ungodly yell you might have heard at the station,
and dropped down in his tracks. I had just time to slip back into the
hedge again before the groom came driving back, and then all hands were
piped, and they took him into the house.
And of course the game was up, and I lost my only chance. I was thankful
enough to get clean away without discovering myself, and I have to trust
now to the fact of Bill's being drunk, and thinking it was my ghost that
he saw, in a touch of the jimjams! And I'm not sorry to have given him
that start, for there was that in his eye, and that in the stroke he
made, my lad, that showed a guilty conscience I hadn't reckoned on. And
it cured me of my wish to set his mind at ease. He's welcome to all the
rest.
And that's why I'm going away--never to return. I'm sorry I couldn't
take you with me, but it's better that I shouldn't see you again, and
that you didn't even know WHERE I was gone. When you get this I shall
be on blue water and heading for the sunshine. You'll find two letters
inclosed. One you need not open unless you hear that my secret was
blown, and you are ever called upon to explain your relations with me.
The other is my thanks, my lad, in a letter of credit on the bank, for
the way you have kept your trust, and I believe will continue to keep
it, to
JOHN DORNTON.
P.S. I hope you dropped a tear over my swell tomb at Dornton Church.
All the same, I don't begrudge it to the poor devil who lost his life
instead of me.
J. D.
As Randolph read, he seemed to hear the captain's voice throughout the
letter, and even his low, characteristic laugh in the postscript. Then
he suddenly remembered the luggage which the porter had said the captain
had ordered to be taken below; but on asking that functionary he was
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