“Well said, Shehan,” observed the man who had so warmly reproved Will Burford, and who had formerly been servant to De Haldimar; “the captain’s hand is as white and as soft as my cross-belt, or, what’s saying a great deal more, as Miss Clara’s herself, heaven bless her sweet countenance! and Lieutenant Valletort’s nigger’s couldn’t well be much blacker nor this.”

“What a set of hignoramuses ye must be,” grunted old Mitchell, “not to see that the captain’s hand is only covered with dirt; and as for the ammunition shoes and trowsers, why you know our officers wear any thing since we have been cooped up in this here fort.”

“Yes, by the holy poker,” (and here we must beg to refer the reader to the soldier’s vocabulary for any terms that may be, in the course of this dialogue, incomprehensible to him or her,)—­“Yes, by the holy poker, off duty, if they like it,” returned Phil Shehan; “but it isn’t even the colonel’s own born son that dare to do so while officer of the guard.”

“Ye are right, comrade,” said Burford; “there would soon be hell and tommy to pay if he did.”

At this point of their conversation, one of the leading men at the litter, in turning to look at its subject, stumbled over the root of a stump that lay in his way, and fell violently forward.  The sudden action destroyed the equilibrium of the corpse, which rolled off its temporary bier upon the earth, and disclosed, for the first time, a face begrimmed with masses of clotted blood, which had streamed forth from the scalped brain during the night.

“It’s the divil himself,” said Phil Shehan, making the sign of the cross, half in jest, half in earnest:  “for it isn’t the captin at all, and who but the divil could have managed to clap on his rigimintals?”

“No, it’s an Ingian,” remarked Dick Burford, sagaciously; “it’s an Ingian that has killed the captain, and dressed himself in his clothes.  I thought he smelt strong, when I helped to pick him up.”

“And that’s the reason why the bloody heathens wouldn’t let us carry him off,” said another of the litter men.  “I thought they wouldn’t ha’ made such a rout about the officer, when they had his scalp already in their pouch-belts.”

“What a set of prating fools ye are,” interrupted the leading sergeant; “who ever saw an Ingian with light hair? and sure this hair in the neck is that of a Christian.”

At that moment Captain Erskine, attracted by the sudden halt produced by the falling of the body, came quickly up to the front.

“What is the meaning of all this, Cassidy?” he sternly demanded of the sergeant; “why is this halt without my orders, and how comes the body here?”

“Carter stumbled against a root, sir, and the body rolled over upon the ground.”

“And was the body to roll back again?” angrily rejoined his captain.—­“What mean ye, fellows, by standing there; quick, replace it upon the litter, and mind this does not occur again.”