I stooped and caught hold of the hind leg of the great black horse, and even as I had once turned a dead bull, so now I turned this carcass on its back.  I picked up the fallen rider and carried him to the woods, and there I propped his body against a tree.  Slowly he opened his eyes, even pulled himself up more fully against the support.

“Thank you, old man,” he said.  “The horse was deucedly heavy—­spoiled that leg, I think.”  He pointed to his boot, where his foot lay turned to one side.  “I suffer badly.  Be a good fellow and end it.”

I answered him by tossing down one of his own pistols, both of which I had secured against need.  He looked at it, but shook his head.

“Let’s talk it over a bit first,” he said.  “I’m done.  I’ll not make any trouble.  Did you ever know me to break parole?”

“No,” said I, and I threw down the other weapon on the ground.  “In mercy to us both, Orme, die.  I do not want to kill you now; and you shall not live.”

“I’m safe enough,” he said.  “It’s through the liver and stomach.  I can’t possibly get over it.”

He stared straight ahead of him, as though summoning his will. “Swami!” I heard him mutter, as though addressing some one.

“There, that’s better,” he said finally.  He sat almost erect, smiling at me.  “It is Asana, the art of posture,” he said.  “I rest my body on my ribs, my soul on the air.  Feel my heart.”

I did so, and drew away my hand almost in terror.  It stopped beating at his will, and began again!  His uncanny art was still under his control!

“I shall be master here for a little while,” he said.  “So—­I move those hurt organs to ease the flow.  But I can’t stop the holes, nor mend them.  We can’t get at the tissues to sew them fast.  After a while I shall die.”  He spoke clearly, with utter calmness, dispassionately.  I never saw his like among men.

I stood by him silently.  He put his own hand on his chest.  “Poor old heart,” he said.  “Feel it work!  Enormous pumping engine, tremendous thing, the heart.  Think what it does in seventy years—­and all for what—­that we may live and enjoy, and so maybe die.  What few minutes I have now I owe to having trained what most folk call an involuntary muscle.  I command my heart to beat, and so it does.”

I looked down at a strange, fascinating soul, a fearsome personality, whose like I never knew in all my life.

“Will you make me a promise?” he said, smiling at me, mocking at me.

“No,” I answered.

“I was going to ask you, after my death to take my heart and send it back to my people at Orme Castle, Gordon Arms, in England—­you know where.  It would be a kindness to the family.”  I gazed at him in a sort of horror, but he smiled and went on.  “We’re mediaeval to-day as ever we were.  Some of us are always making trouble, one corner or the other of the world, and until the last Gordon heart comes home to rest, there’s no peace for that generation.  Hundreds of years, they’ve traveled all over the world, and been lost, and stolen, and hidden.  My father’s is lost now, somewhere.  Had it come back home to rest, my own life might have been different.  I say, Cowles, couldn’t you do that for me?  We’ve nearly always had some last friend that would—­we Gordons.”