The scene used to sicken me, so that I could hardly keep my seat in the saddle, and in my heart I thanked God that I was judged too unskilful as yet to be chosen as one of the firing party. That, of course, was nothing more than sentiment. These men were rebels, opposed to the King’s Government, and such malignant fellows well deserved their fate. Yet there began to spring up within me some admiration for their bravery. Not one of them was afraid to die. Sometimes, of a night, before sleep came to me, I would review the events of the day--not willingly, for the long and grisly tale of horror was one that no man would of set purpose dwell upon, but because in my soul I had begun to doubt the quality of the justice we meted out. It was a dangerous mood for one who had sworn allegiance to the King, and taken service under his standard: but I found myself beginning to wonder whether the people whom we were harrying so mercilessly and putting to death with as little compunction as though they had been reptiles instead of hard-working and thrifty folk--as their little farms and houses proved--were rebels in any real sense. I had no knowledge, as yet, of what had gone before, and I was afraid to ask any of my fellows, lest my questioning should bring doubt upon my own loyalty. But I wondered why these men, some gone far in eld and others in the morning of their days, were ready to die rather than say the few words that would give them life and liberty. Gradually the light broke through the darkness of my thoughts, and I began to understand that in their bearing there was something more than mere disloyalty to the King. They died unflinching, because they were loyal to some ideal that was more precious to them than life, and which torture and the prospect of death could not make them forswear. Were they wrong? Who was I, to judge? I knew nothing of their history, and when first I set out with Lag’s Horse I cared as little. I had ridden forth to do battle against rebels. I found myself one of a band engaged in the hideous task of exercising duress upon other men’s consciences. The thought was not a pleasant one, and I tried to banish it, but it would come back to me in the still watches when no sound was audible but the heavy breathing of my sleeping companions,--and no sophistry sufficed to stifle it. Day after day we continued our march westward through Galloway, leaving behind us a track of burning homesteads, with here and there a stark figure, supine, with a bloody gash in his breast, and a weary face turned up to the eternal sky. The sky was laughing in the May sunshine: the blue hyacinths clustered like a low-lying cloud of peat-smoke in the woods by the roadside, and the larks cast the gold of their song into the sea of the air beneath them. The whole earth was full of joy and beauty; but where we passed, we left desolation, and blood and tears.