“And why not go along with me, captain?  I hate to go alone, and hate to leave you where you are.  I shan’t think you out of danger while you stay here, and don’t see any reason for you to do so.”

“Perhaps not, Dillon; but there is reason, or I should not stay.  We may not go together, even if I were to fly—­our paths lie asunder.  They may never more be one.  Go you, therefore, and heed me not; and think of me no more.  Make yourself a home in the Mississippi, or on the Red river, and get yourself a fireside and family of your own.  These are the things that will keep your heart warm within you, cheering you in hours that are dark, like this.”

“And why, captain,” replied the lieutenant, much affected—­“why should you not take the course which you advise for me?  Why not, in the Arkansas, make yourself a home, and with a wife—­”

“Silence, sir!—­not a word of that!  Why come you to chafe me here in my den?  Am I to be haunted for ever with such as you, and with words like these?” and the brow of the outlaw blackened as he spoke, and his white teeth knit together, fiercely gnashing for an instant, while the foam worked its way through the occasional aperture between them.  The ebullition of passion, however, lasted not long, and the outlaw himself, a moment after, seemed conscious of its injustice.

“I do you wrong, Dillon; but on this subject I will have no one speak.  I can not be the man you would have me; I have been schooled otherwise.  My mother has taught me a different lesson; her teachings have doomed me, and these enjoyments are now all beyond my hope.”

“Your mother?” was the response of Dillon, in unaffected astonishment.

“Ay, man—­my mother!  Is there anything wonderful in that?  She taught me the love of evil with her milk—­she sang it in lullabies over my cradle—­she gave it me in the playthings of my boyhood; her schoolings have made me the morbid, the fierce criminal, the wilful, vexing spirit, from whose association all the gentler virtues must always desire to fly.  If, in the doom which may finish my life of doom, I have any one person to accuse of all, that person is—­my mother!”

“Is this possible?  Can it be true?  It is strange—­very strange!”

“It is not strange; we see it every day—­in almost every family.  She, did not tell me to lie, or to swindle, or to stab—­no! oh, no! she would have told me that all these things were bad; but she taught me to perform them all.  She roused my passions, and not my principles, into activity.  She provoked the one, and suppressed the other.  Did my father reprove my improprieties, she petted me, and denounced him.  She crossed his better purposes, and defeated all his designs, until, at last, she made my passions too strong for my government, not less than hers; and left me, knowing the true, yet the victim of the false.  Thus it was that, while my intellect, in its calmer hours, taught me that virtue is the only source of true felicity, my ungovernable passions set the otherwise sovereign reason at defiance, and trampled it under foot.  Yes, in that last hour of eternal retribution, if called upon to denounce or to accuse, I can point but to one as the author of all—­the weakly-fond, misjudging, misguiding woman who gave me birth!