“No doubt you are game enough,” mourned Evans; “I wish you wern’t.”

“And as for you, you came here to seduce a sick, broken creature from his Master’s service; you shall remain to be enlisted in it yourself instead.”

Evans shuffled uneasily on his chair at these words.  “I think I am on your side,” said he.

“Half! but it is no use being half anything; your hour is come to choose between all right and all wrong.”

“I wouldn’t be long choosing if it warn’t for one thing.”

“And what is that one thing which can outweigh the one thing needful?”

“My wife and my four children; if I get myself turned out of this jail how am I to find bread for that small lot?”

“And do you think shilly-shallying between two stools will secure your seat?  You have gone too far with me to retract; don’t you see that the jailer means to get you dismissed the next time the justices visit the jail for business?  Can’t you read your fate in the man’s eye?”

Evans groaned.  “I read it, I read it, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

“He set a trap for you half an hour after you had defended me.”

“He did!  I told my wife I was a gone coon, but she overpersuaded me; ‘Keep quiet,’ said she, ’and ‘twill blow over.’  But you see it in the same light as I did, don’t you, sir?”

Mr. Eden smiled grimly in assent.

“You are a doomed man,” said he coolly; “half measures can’t save you, but whole measures may—­perhaps.”

“What is to be done, sir?” asked Evans helplessly.

“Your only chance is to go heart and hand with me in the project which occupies me now.”

“I will, sir,” cried Fluctuans, with a sudden burst of resolution, “for I’m druv in a corner.  So please tell me what is your project?”

“To get Mr. Hawes dismissed from this jail.”

As he uttered these words the reverend gentleman had a severe spasm which forced him to lie back and draw his breath hard.  Evans uttered something between a cry of dismay and a groan of despair, and stared down upon this audacious invalid with wonder and ire at his supernatural but absurd cool courage.

“Turn our governor out of this jail?  Now hark to that.  You might as well try to move a mountain; and look at you lying there scarce able to move yourself, and talking like that.”

“Pour me out a cup of tea, Mr. Faintheart; I am in great pain—­thank you.”

He took the cup, and as he stirred it he said coolly, “Did you ever read of Marshal Saxe, Mr. Faintheart?  He fought the battle of Fontenoy as he lay a dying.  He had himself carried on his bed of death from one part of the field to another; at first the fight went against him, but he spurned craven counsels with his expiring heart; he saw the enemy’s blunder with his dying eye, and waved his troops on to victory with his dying hand.  This is one of the great feats of earth.  But the soldiers of Christ are as stout-hearted as any man that ever carried a marshal’s baton or a sergeant’s pike.  Yes!  I am ill, and I feel as if I were dying, Evans; but living or dying I am the Lord’s.  I will fight for Him to the last gasp, and I will thrust this malefactor from his high office with the last action of my hand—­Will you help me, or will you not?”