For a minute the intended assassin scarcely seemed to breathe, and to have but one wish--that the deed were undone, for the hot blood that prompted it was cool enough now, and the instincts of revenge had grown dull. Terror seized his soul, and his gaze wandered in the air, on the while flying clouds, on the yellow stubble fields and waving woods; but he nerved himself to approach the startled and infuriated group, whose menacing eyes were on him; and he nerved himself also to act a part, or, if not, lose his senses, and with them, everything. He felt that beyond cheating, cardsharping, jockeying at horse races, and peculation at Earlshaugh, he had taken a mighty stride in crime, and that mingling curiously with his craven fear, there was an insane recklessness--a wild incoherence about his brain and heart, with a sickening knowledge that if Captain Elliot died, he--Hawkey Sharpe--would be _that_ which he dared not name to himself, even in thought. Hence his apparent sorrow and compunction seemed, and perhaps were, genuine _pro tem._, but the outcome of selfishness. 'How in Heaven's name came this to pass--how did it happen?' demanded Roland, his eyes blazing as he fixed them on Sharpe. 'It was an accident--an entire accident,' faltered the latter. 'The leaves of a turnip twisted round my right ankle, causing me to stumble and my rifle to explode.' 'A likely thing,' growled Jamie Spens, the beater, with a scowl in his eyes. 'Ye were oot o' the belt o' neeps at the time; but I've aye thocht ye wad pot some puir devil, as ye have done the Captain.' 'Silence, you poaching----,' began Sharpe in a furious voice; but Roland interrupted him. 'Stand back, sir. This is no time for words. "Accident," you say. To me it seems a piece of cowardly revenge--a case for the police and the Procurator-Fiscal.' At these words Hawkey Sharpe grew, if possible, paler still, as they were the echoes of his own fears, and drew sullenly back. 'My poor, dear fellow--Elliot--Jack,' exclaimed Roland, kneeling down by his friend's side, 'are you much hurt--tell me?' 'I cannot say,' replied Elliot faintly. 'I feel as if my breast was scorched with fire--the charge, or some of it, seems thereabout.' Then, after a pause, he added in a husky voice: 'This horrible accident is most inopportune, when my leave is running out, and I am so soon due at headquarters.' 'Don't bother about that, dear Jack, I'll make all that right--meantime your hurt must be instantly seen to. Jamie Spens, run, as if for your life, my man, to the stables; get a good horse from Buckle, and ride to Cupar on the spur for the doctors--send a couple, at least.' 'Let me--let me go!' urged Hawkey Sharpe, in a breathless voice. 'You--be hanged!' cried old Fowler, who, like all the people on and about the estate, hated the tyrannical steward. So the ex-poacher was away on his errand--speeding across the fields like a hare.