He had come into the conflict without a weapon of any kind; only begging me to let him be in the very thick of it.  For him, he said, life was no matter, after the loss of his wife and child; but death was matter to him, and he meant to make the most of it.  Such a face I never saw, and never hope to see again, as when poor Kit Badcock spied Charley coming towards us.

We had thought this man a patient fool, a philosopher of a little sort, or one who could feel nothing.  And his quiet manner of going about, and the gentleness of his answers (when some brutes asked him where his wife was, and whether his baby had been well-trussed), these had misled us to think that the man would turn the mild cheek to everything.  But I, in the loneliness of our barn, had listened, and had wept with him.

Therefore was I not surprised, so much as all the rest of us, when, in the foremost of red light, Kit went up to Charleworth Doone, as if to some inheritance; and took his seisin of right upon him, being himself a powerful man; and begged a word aside with him.  What they said aside, I know not; all I know is that without weapon, each man killed the other.  And Margery Badcock came, and wept, and hung upon her poor husband; and died, that summer, of heart-disease.

Now for these and other things (whereof I could tell a thousand) was the reckoning come that night; and not a line we missed of it; soon as our bad blood was up.  I like not to tell of slaughter, though it might be of wolves and tigers; and that was a night of fire and slaughter, and of very long-harboured revenge.  Enough that ere the daylight broke upon that wan March morning, the only Doones still left alive were the Counsellor and Carver.  And of all the dwellings of the Doones (inhabited with luxury, and luscious taste, and licentiousness) not even one was left, but all made potash in the river.

This may seem a violent and unholy revenge upon them.  And I (who led the heart of it) have in these my latter years doubted how I shall be judged, not of men—­for God only knows the errors of man’s judgments—­but by that great God Himself, the front of whose forehead is mercy.

CHAPTER LXXII

THE COUNSELLOR AND THE CARVER

[Illustration:  671.jpg Law and Justice]

From that great confusion—­for nothing can be broken up, whether lawful or unlawful, without a vast amount of dust, and many people grumbling, and mourning for the good old times, when all the world was happiness, and every man a gentleman, and the sun himself far brighter than since the brassy idol upon which he shone was broken—­from all this loss of ancient landmarks (as unrobbed men began to call our clearance of those murderers) we returned on the following day, almost as full of anxiety as we were of triumph.  In the first place, what could we possibly do with all these women and children, thrown on our hands as one might say, with none to