"Fight me—would you, eh! Kill me, perhaps! We’ve settled accounts at last—haven’t we?" But hearing no answer he turned at the door to look back and saw the General lying where he had fallen, outstretched and still. At that sight the breath seemed to go out of his body at one gasp. His head turned giddy, and the red gleams of the sunset which were deflected into the room appeared to his half-blind eyes to cover everything with blood. *CHAPTER XXIX* Gordon stood with his mouth open, the brute sense struck out of him by the dead silence. Then he said— "Get up! Why don’t you get up?" hardly knowing what he was saying. He got no answer, and a horrible idea began to take shape in his mind. Though so hot a moment ago, he shivered and his teeth began to chatter. He looked around him for a moment in the dazed way of a man awakening from a nightmare, and then stepped up on tiptoe to where the General lay. Raising his head he looked at him, and found it hard to believe that what he vaguely feared had happened. There was no sign of injury anywhere. The eyes were open, and they looked fixedly at him with so fierce a stare that they seemed to jump out of their sockets. "Stunned—that’s all—stunned by the fall," he thought, and seeing a bottle of brandy on the shelf of the desk he got up and poured a little into the medicine glass, and then, kneeling and lifting the General’s head again, he forced the liquor through the tightly compressed lips. It ran out as it went in, and, with gathering fear and fumbling fingers, Gordon unbuttoned the General’s frock coat and laid a trembling hand over his heart. At one moment he thought he felt a beat, but at the next he knew it was only the throb of his own pulse. At that the world seemed for a moment to be blotted out, and when he came to himself again he was holding the General in his arms and calling to him— "General! General! Speak to me! For God’s sake speak to me." In the torrent of his remorse he was kissing the General’s forehead, and crying over his face, but there was no response. Then a great trembling shook his whole body, and dropping the head gently back to the floor he rose to his feet. The General was dead, and he knew it. He had seen death a hundred times before, but only on the battlefield, amid the boom of cannon, the wail of shell, the snap of rifles, and the oaths of men, but now it filled him with terror. The silence was awful. A minute ago the General had been a living man, face to face with him, and the room had been ringing with the clashing of their voices; but now this breathless hush, this paralysing stillness, in which the very air seemed to be dead, for something was gone as by the stroke of an almighty hand, and there was nothing left but the motionless figure at his feet.