“Ha, ha, ha!  Chub don’t mind your hickories—­Chub’s fingers are long—­he will pull away all the stones of your house, and then you will have to live in the tree-top.”

But on a sudden his tune was changed, as Rivers, half-irritated by the pertinacity of the dwarf, pull out a pistol, and directed it at his head.  In a moment, the old influence was predominant, and in undisguised terror he cried out—­

“Now don’t—­don’t, Mr. Guy—­don’t you shoot Chub—­Chub won’t laugh again—­he won’t pull away the stones—­he won’t.”

The outlaw now laughed himself at the terror which he had inspired, and beckoning the boy near him, he proceeded, if possible, to persuade him into a feeling of amity.  There was a strange temper in him with reference to this outcast.  His deformity—­his desolate condition—­his deficient intellect, inspired, in the breast of the fierce man, a feeling of sympathy, which he had not entertained for the whole world of humanity beside.

Such is the contradictory character of the misled and the erring spirit.  Warped to enjoy crime—­to love the deformities of all moral things—­to seek after and to surrender itself up to all manner of perversions, yet now and then, in the long tissue, returning, for some moments, to the original temper of that first nature not yet utterly departed; and few and feeble though the fibres be which still bind the heart to her worship, still strong enough at times to remind it of the true, however it may be insufficient to restrain it in its wanderings after the false.

But the language and effort of the outlaw, though singularly kind, failed to have any of the desired effect upon the dwarf.  With an unhesitating refusal to enter the outlaw’s dwelling-place in the rocks, he bounded away into a hollow of the hills, and in a moment was out of sight of his companion.  Fatigued with his recent exertions, and somewhat more sullen than usual, Rivers entered the gloomy abode, into which it is not our present design to follow him.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

PURSUIT—­DEATH.

The fugitives, meanwhile, pursued their way with the speed of men conscious that life and death hung upon their progress.  There needed no exhortations from his companion to Ralph Colleton.  More than life, with him, depended upon his speed.  The shame of such a death as that to which he had been destined was for ever before his eyes, and with a heart nerved to its utmost by a reference to the awful alternative of flight, he grew reckless in the audacity with which he drove his horse forward in defiance of all obstacle and over every impediment.  Nor were the present apprehensions of Munro much less than those of his companion.  To be overtaken, as the participant of the flight of one whose life was forfeit, would necessarily invite such an examination of himself as must result in the development of his true character, and such a discovery must only terminate in his conviction and sentence to the same doom.  His previously-uttered presentiment grew more than ever strong with the growing consciousness of his danger; and with an animation, the fruit of an anxiety little short of absolute fear, he stimulated the progress of Colleton, while himself driving the rowel ruthlessly into the smoking sides of the animal he bestrode.