I could have beaten him.  But I had so grossly overshot the mark that I suppose it took me two good miles of road and half an hour of elocution to persuade him I had been in earnest.  In the course of which I became so interested in demonstrating my present danger that I forgot all about my future safety, and not only told him the story of Goguelat, but threw in the business of the drovers as well, and ended by blurting out that I was a soldier of Napoleon’s and a prisoner of war.

This was far from my views when I began; and it is a common complaint of me that I have a long tongue.  I believe it is a fault beloved by fortune.  Which of you considerate fellows would have done a thing at once so foolhardy and so wise as to make a confidant of a boy in his teens, and positively smelling of the nursery?  And when had I cause to repent it?  There is none so apt as a boy to be the adviser of any man in difficulties such as mine.  To the beginnings of virile common sense he adds the last lights of the child’s imagination; and he can fling himself into business with that superior earnestness that properly belongs to play.  And Rowley was a boy made to my hand.  He had a high sense of romance, and a secret cultus for all soldiers and criminals.  His travelling library consisted of a chap-book life of Wallace and some sixpenny parts of the ‘Old Bailey Sessions Papers’ by Gurney the shorthand writer; and the choice depicts his character to a hair.  You can imagine how his new prospects brightened on a boy of this disposition.  To be the servant and companion of a fugitive, a soldier, and a murderer, rolled in one—­to live by stratagems, disguises, and false names, in an atmosphere of midnight and mystery so thick that you could cut it with a knife—­was really, I believe, more dear to him than his meals, though he was a great trencherman, and something of a glutton besides.  For myself, as the peg by which all this romantic business hung, I was simply idolised from that moment; and he would rather have sacrificed his hand than surrendered the privilege of serving me.

We arranged the terms of our campaign, trudging amicably in the snow, which now, with the approach of morning, began to fall to purpose.  I chose the name of Ramornie, I imagine from its likeness to Romaine; Rowley, from an irresistible conversion of ideas, I dubbed Gammon.  His distress was laughable to witness:  his own choice of an unassuming nickname had been Claude Duval!  We settled our procedure at the various inns where we should alight, rehearsed our little manners like a piece of drill until it seemed impossible we should ever be taken unprepared; and in all these dispositions, you maybe sure the despatch-box was not forgotten.  Who was to pick it up, who was to set it down, who was to remain beside it, who was to sleep with it—­there was no contingency omitted, all was gone into with the thoroughness of a drill-sergeant on the one hand and a child with a new plaything on the other.