"Deadly Dash! What a shot he was! Never missed," said my friend, whose own gun is known well enough at Hornsey-wood House; therewith falling into a reverie, tinged with the Jacques-like gloom of Epsomitis in its severest form, from which he awoke to tell me slowly, between long draughts of iced drinks, what I write now. I alter his tale in nothing, save in filling in with words the gaps and blanks that he made, all-eloquent in his halting oratory, by meditative, plaintive, moralizing puffs from his tonic, the _brûle gueule_, and an occasional appeal to my imagination in the customary formula of "Oh, bother!--_you_ understand--all the rest of it you know," which, though it tells everything over claret, is not so clear a mode of relation in type. For all else here the story is as he gave it to me. * * * * * "Deadly Dash!" It was a fatal sounding sobriquet, and had a fatal fascination for many, for me as well as the rest, when I was in my salad days and joined the old ----th, amongst whose Light Dragoons, it was so signally and ominously famous. The nickname had a wide significance; "_he always kills_," was said with twofold truth, in twofold meaning of Dash; in a _barrière_ duel he would wheel lightly, aim carelessly, and send the ball straight as any arrow through heart or lung, just as he fancied, in the neatest style anybody could dream of; and in an intrigue he took just the same measures, and hit as invariably with the self-same skill and the self-same indifference. "He always kills" applied equally to either kind of affair, and got him his sobriquet, which he received with as laughing an equanimity as a riding man gets the Gilt Vase, or a "lover of the leash" the Ravensworth Stakes, or the Puppy Cup and Goblet. He was proud of it, and had only one regret, that he lived in the dead days of the duel, and could only go out when he was on French soil. In dare-devilry of every sort he out-Heroded Herod, and distanced any who were mad enough to try the pace with him in that steeple-chase commonly called "going to the bad." It was a miracle how often he used to reach the stage of "_complete_ ruin" that the Prince de Soubise once sighed for as an unattainable paradise; and picked himself up again, without a hair turned, as one may say, and started off with as fresh a pace as though nothing had knocked him over. Other men got his speed sometimes; but nobody could ever equal his stay. For an "out and out goer" there was nobody like Deadly Dash; and though only a Captain of Horse, with few "expectations," he did what Dukes daren't have done, and lived at a faster rate than all the elder sons in the kingdom put together. Dash had the best bow and the brightest wits, the lightest morals and the heaviest debts of any _sabreur_ in the Service; very unscrupulous fellows were staggered at _his_ devil-me-care vices; and as for reputation,--"a deuced pleasant fellow, Dash," they used to say at