"Of course!" growled a man to me once in the Guards' smoking-room, an order of the Scots Fusilleers to Montreal having turned him misanthrope. "Did Mephistopheles ever come out in full harness, with horns and tail complete, eh? Not such a fool. He looked like a gentleman, and talked like a wit. Would the most dunder-headed Cain in Christendom, I should be glad to know, be such an ass as to go about town with the brand on his forehead, when he could turn down Bond Street any day and get a dash of the ladies' pearl powder? Who ever _shows_ anything now, my good fellow? Not that Dash 'paints,' to give the deuce his due--except himself a little blacker even than he is; he don't cant; he couldn't cant; not to save his life, I believe. But as to his bewitching you, almost as bad as he does the women, I know all about that. I used to swear by him till----" "Till what?" "Till he cut a brother of mine out with Rachel, and shot him in the woods of Chantilly for flaring-up rough at the rivalry. Charlie was rather a good fellow, and Dash and I didn't speak after that, you see. Great bore; bosh too, perhaps. Dash brews the best Curaçoa punch in Europe, and if he name you the winning mount for the Granby, you may let the talent damn you as they like. Still you know as he killed Charlie,--" and the Guardsman stuck a great cheroot in his mouth, in doubt as to whether, after all, it wasn't humbug, and an uncalled-for sacrifice, rather scenic and sentimental, to drop an expert at Curaçoa brew, and a sure prophet for Croxton Park, just because in a legitimate fashion he had potted your brother and relieved your entail;--on the whole, a friendly act rather than otherwise? "Keep clear of the Killer, though, young one," he added, as he sauntered out. "He's like that cheetah cub of Berkeley's; soft as silk, you know, _patte de velours_, and what d'ye call 'em, and all the rest of it, but deucedly deadly to deal with." I did know: it was the eternal refrain that was heard on all sides; from the wily Jews through whose meshes he slipped; the unhappy duns who were done by him; the beauties who were bewitched by him; the hosts and husbands who, having him down for the pheasants, found him poach other preserves than those of the cover-sides; the women who had their characters shattered by a silvery sneer from a voice that was as soft, in its murderous slander, as in its equally murderous wooing; and all the rest, who, in some shape or another, owed ruin to that Apollo Apollyon--Deadly Dash. Ruin which at last became so wide and so deep, that even vice began to look virtuous when his name was mentioned (vice always does when she thinks you are really cleared out), and men of his own corps and his own club began to get shy of having the Killer's arm linked in theirs too often down Pall Mall, for its wrist was terribly steady in either Hazard, whether of the yard of green table or the twenty yards of green turf.