Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/90

13, 1861.] stay with him till morning, and then we’ll think what is best to be done.’

“It might have been about daylight when Alick roused up all of a sudden. He sat up, looked round the tent, and seeing me seated on the opposite bunk, he exclaimed:

‘Why, what’s all this? I must have been ill.’

“I didn’t make him any answer, so he laid himself down again, and turning himself so that I couldn’t see his face, he said, after a bit:

‘Where’s Charley? Didn’t Charley come back last night?’

‘Where Charley is, Alick,’ said I, ‘you best know.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ says he, savagely, starting up, and facing me.

‘I mean,’ says I, ‘that you said things in your sleep last night that want explaining.’

‘What did I say?’ says he.

‘Never mind the exact words,’ says I; ‘but I may just as well tell you that before my mate and me you said as much as that you had murdered Charley Smart.’

With“With [sic] that he dropped back on his bunk again, as if he had been shot. He lay a long time without speaking. At last he raised himself up on one arm, and, says he:

‘Bill, it’s no use my keeping the matter to myself any longer. Charley’s ghost came for me last night, and though I escaped him that time, it’s all up with me I feel. I did murder him. I followed him that Sunday morning, and shot him down in a gully a few miles from here. I hid his body in the scrub, and in the evening I went down and buried him, but his grave was not deep enough—his grave was not deep enough.’

‘Well, Alick,’ says I, ‘I didn’t ask you to tell me all this, but now you have done so, I must do my duty.’

‘I know—I know,’ says he. ‘Let me go down with you, and show you where the body is buried, and then you may hand me over to the traps as soon as you like. I have been sick of my life this long time.’

“Well, I called my mate, and sent him up to the Stars and Stripes, where he found some of the boys who had come in for their morning-drink, and told them all about it, and a pretty row there was at once, as you may well think. Some of the Yankees were for lynching him right away, but the rest of us wouldn’t agree to it, and at last it was settled that Alick should go down with us, and show us the grave; and that in order not to attract the attention of those whom we might meet on the road, he should not be bound. It was necessary to take the greatest care in order to get him safe into the hands of the troopers, for if the news of the murder had once got noised about the township, he wouldn’t have had many minutes to say his prayers in, I can tell you. However, we put our revolvers in our pockets, and gave him