"Ye penitentiaried me oncet," went on the sergeant in dead-voiced reiteration of an old theme. "Ye sent me thar when ye didn't have nothin' erginst me. In the penitensherry--" he talked on half-coherently, half-ramblingly--"a feller jest studies 'bout things and gits meaner--and hyar hit 'pears like he kin git meaner yit." "You must have dragged me away from that ravine," interrupted Falkins, realizing that they were not where he had fallen, and reasoning rather with himself than with the other. "You saved me yesterday. Why did you do that?" "Because," retorted the other quickly, with a fierce up-leaping of passion to his eyes, "because I was savin' my superior officer--not you, but a man in that uniform--besides ye b'longed ter me. I wasn't a-goin' ter suffer no nigger ter git ye. Thet would hev been a soldier's death. Now thar's jest two of us--we ain't soldiers now--we're jest men." Falkins lay of necessity outstretched, awaiting the pleasure of his captor. About him swarmed mosquitoes, and he tossed his head in the vain effort to shake them off, and slapped viciously at them--for with his feet trussed there had been no necessity to tie his hands. Above him he could see patches of blue between the waving palm fronds, and to his fevered eyes the sky seemed to rock and ripple like a placid sea. Then he looked at the other soldier, standing at a distance, and the soldier, too, seemed to wave gently from head to foot as though painted on a fluttering curtain, but he read in the glowering face that the man meant to kill him. "You fool!" he muttered. "You poor damned fool!" He spoke in a voice of lassitude, as though his interest in the matter were academic and dilute. In his brain, the tide of fever was rising afresh, and this time it stole on him with the warmth of a comfortable narcotic. But Newt Spooner went on, more steadily now, though with no faltering of determination. "I've waited the hell of a time.... I told ye my chanst would come.... I told ye, when ye tried ter play a damn' hero there at 'Frisco, thet I'd git my chanst. Ef I'd kilt ye then, ye'd hev hed all ther best of hit, but now hit's different. Now I kin make ye pray fer mercy--an' not git none." "Kill me, and be damned to you!" snapped the bound man, for a moment roused out of growing stupor into a peevish irritability. "I'm no more afraid of you now than I was then." "I reckon," the boy spoke very deliberately and impressively, "I reckon I knows a way ter make ye skeered." It had been a long time now since Newton Spooner had talked in the uncouth vernacular of the hills, but the Newt Spooner of this morning was, it seemed, a man relapsed; a man from whom had slipped all the changes that the months had wrought. He came slowly and unsteadily over, and squatted on his haunches above the prostrate figure. He drew one hand from behind him, and held it out.