CHAPTER XVI.

A SHADOWY PURSUIT.

It was a fearful pledge to exact, but Jack Everson gave it without
hesitation.

"You understand me; enough; let us lose no more time; I will turn to
the right; good-bye; we are all in the hands of God."

There was not a tear in the eye of the parent. His heart might be torn
by grief, but he was now the Roman from whose lips no murmuring was
heard.

It seemed to Jack Everson that the strangeness of the incidents of the
past hour had lifted him into a state of exaltation. He never felt
calmer nor more self-possessed than when hurrying over the path, rifle
in hand, revolver at his hip with the belief that there was not one
chance in a thousand that he would ever again look upon the one who had
won his heart when the two were on the other side of the world and for
whose sake he was ready to go to the uttermost lengths of the earth.

His feeling was: "They have stolen her from us, but by the Eternal she
shall cost them dear!"

There was no thought of what all this implied to himself. He did not
care what the consequences were, so far as he was concerned. It came
to be a legend among the men desperately defending their families and
themselves during the horrors of the Sepoy mutiny, that in fighting the