“Within the last hour I have been thinking over all these things.  I have been thinking how I had been cursed in childhood by one who surely loved me beyond all other things besides.  I can remember how sedulously she encouraged and prompted my infant passions, uncontrolled by her authority and reason, and since utterly unrestrainable by my own.  How she stimulated me to artifices, and set me the example herself, by frequently deceiving my father, and teaching me to disobey and deceive him!  She told me not to lie; and she lied all day to him, on my account, and to screen me from his anger.  She taught me the catechism, to say on Sunday, while during the week she schooled me in almost every possible form of ingenuity to violate all its precepts.  She bribed me to do my duty, and hence my duty could only be done under the stimulating promise of a reward; and, without the reward, I went counter to the duty.  She taught me that God was superior to all, and that he required obedience to certain laws; yet, as she hourly violated those laws herself in my behalf, I was taught to regard myself as far superior to him!  Had she not done all this, I had not been here and thus:  I had been what now I dare not think on.  It is all her work.  The greatest enemy my life has ever known has been my mother!”

“This is a horrible thought, captain; yet I can not but think it true.”

“It is true!  I have analyzed my own history, and the causes of my character and fortunes now, and I charge it all upon her.  From one influence I have traced another, and another, until I have the sweeping amount of twenty years of crime and sorrow, and a life of hate, and probably a death of ignominy—­all owing to the first ten years of my infant education, where the only teacher that I knew was the woman who gave me birth!—­But this concerns not you.  In my calm mood, Dillon, you have the fruit of my reason:  to abide its dictate, I should fly with you; but I suffer from my mother’s teachings even in this.  My passions, my pride, my fierce hope—­the creature of a maddening passion—­will not let me fly; and I stay, though I stay alone, with a throat bare for the knife of the butcher, or the halter of the hangman.  I will not fly!”

“And I will stay with you.  I can dare something, too, captain; and you shall not say, when the worst comes to the worst, that Tom Dillon was the man to back out.  I will not go either, and, whatever is the chance, you shall not be alone.”

Rivers, for a moment, seemed touched by the devotion, of his follower, and was silent for a brief interval; but suddenly the expression of his eye was changed, and he spoke briefly and sternly:—­

“You shall not stay with me, sir!  What! am I so low as this, that I may not be permitted to be alone when I will?  Will my subordinates fly in my face, and presume to disobey my commands?  Go, Dillon—­have I not said that you must fly—­that I no longer need your services?  Why linger, then, where you are no longer needed?  I have that to perform which requires me to be alone, and I have no further time to spare you.  Go—­away!”