"Red Rapparee," said he, "it is not that I am afraid of death as such,
but I feel that I am not prepared to die. Suffer my servant and myself
to go home without harm, and I shall engage not only to get you a pardon
from the Government of the country, but I shall furnish you with money
either to take you to some useful calling, or to emigrate to some
foreign country, where nobody will know of your misdeeds, or the life
you have led here."

"Randal, my man," added Andy, "listen to what the gentleman says, and
you may escape what you know yet. As for my master, Randal, let him
pass, and take me in his place. I may as well die now, maybe, as another
time. I was an honest, faithful servant, at all times. I have neither
chick nor child to cry for me. No wife, thank God, to break my heart
afther. My conscience is light and airy, like a beggarmans blanket,
as they say; and, barrin' that I once got drunk wid your uncle in Moll
Flanagan's sheebeen house, I don't know that I have much to trouble me.
Spare _him_, then, and take _me_, if it must come to that. He has the
_Cooleen Bawn_ to think for. Do you think of her, too; and remember that
it was she who saved your uncle from the gallows."

This unlucky allusion only deepened the vengeance of the Red Rapparee,
who looked to the priming of his gun, and was in the act of preparing
to perpetrate this most in-human and awful murder, when all interruption
took place for which neither party was prepared.

Now, it so happened that within about eight or ten yards of where they
stood there existed the walls and a portion of the arched roof of one
of those old ecclesiastical ruins, which our antiquarians denominate
Cyclopean, like _lucus a non lucendo_, because scarcely a dozen men
could kneel in them. Over this sad ruin was what sportsmen term "a pass"