There was a wild medley of dark figures in the moonlight, and a ringing cheer from well-known voices. The humorists of Harvey’s Sluice had found something even more practical than the joke which they had come to witness. The partners saw the faces of friends beside them--Shamus, Struggles, McCoy. There was a desperate rally, a sweeping fiery rush, a cloud of smoke, with pistol-shots and fierce oaths ringing out of it, and when it lifted, a single dark shadow flying for dear life to the shelter of the broken hedge was the only ranger upon his feet within the little garden. But there was no sound of triumph among the victors; a strange hush had come over them, and a murmur as of grief--for there, lying across the threshold which he had fought so gallantly to defend, lay poor Abe, the loyal and simple-hearted, breathing heavily with a bullet through his lungs. He was carried inside with all the rough tenderness of the mines. There were men there, I think, who would have borne his hurt to have had the love of that white girlish figure, which bent over the blood-stained bed and whispered so softly and so tenderly in his ear. Her voice seemed to rouse him. He opened his dreamy blue eyes and looked about him. They rested on her face. “Played out,” he murmured; “pardon, Carrie, morib----” and with a faint smile he sank back upon the pillow. However, Abe failed for once to be as good as his word. His hardy constitution asserted itself, and he shook off what might in a weaker man have proved a deadly wound. Whether it was the balmy air of the woodlands which came sweeping over a thousand miles of forest into the sick man’s room, or whether it was the little nurse who tended him so gently, certain it is that within two months we heard that he had realized his shares in the Conemara, and gone from Harvey’s Sluice and the little shanty upon the hill forever. I had the advantage, a short time afterward, of seeing an extract from the letter of a young lady named Amelia, to whom we have made a casual allusion in the course of our narrative. We have already broken the privacy of one feminine epistle, so we shall have fewer scruples in glancing at another. “I was bridesmaid,” she remarks, “and Carrie looked charming” (underlined) “in the vail and orange blossoms. Such a man, he is, twice as big as your Jack, and he was so funny, and blushed, and dropped the prayer-book. And when they asked the question you could have heard him roar ‘I do!’ at the other end of George Street. His best man was a darling” (twice underlined). “So quiet and handsome and nice. Too gentle to take care of himself among those rough men, I am sure.” I think it quite possible that in the fulness of time Miss Amelia managed to take upon herself the care of our old friend Mr. Jack Morgan, commonly known as the Boss.