E. W. Hornung

“ If so, they would be glad to see me, and as yet there was whisky for all comers.
I turned out instantly in my dressing-gown and slippers, found Uvo shivering in his, and raced him to the scene. It took some finding in the fog, until the lighted hall flashed upon us like a dark lantern at arm's length. In the class-room at the back of the house, round the gas fire which obtained in all our houses, pedagogue and pupils were still telling their tale by turns and in chaotic chorus. ”

“ And he shuddered into the chair nearest the glowing lumps of white asbestos licked by thin blue flames.
"God bless my soul, no more would I!" cried the crammer heartily. "I aimed low on purpose not to do more than wing them; there's my bullet in the door to say so, whereas theirs fairly whistled past my head on its way through that up-stairs window. ”

“ I blustered. "They're destructive children who've never grown up, and they ought to be taken care of till they do."
He smiled through his smoke with sinister serenity.
"But we all are children, my dear Gilly, and on the best authority most of us are fools. As for the destructive faculty, it's part of human nature and three parts of modern policy; but our politicians haven't the child's excuse of wanting to know how things are made—which I see at the back of half the brains that get blown out by obvious accident."
"Good-night, Uvo," I said, just grasping him by the arm. ”

“ But with that barrel glittering in your hand, Mr. Delavoye, I fancy you'd find it easier to keep up a conversation with some intrusive connoisseur."
"Is it loaded?" I asked as Uvo took the weapon gingerly from its box.
"Not at the moment, and I fear these few cartridges are all I can spare. I only keep enough myself for an emergency. I need hardly warn you, by the way, against pistol practice in these little gardens? It would be most unsafe with a revolver of this calibre. Why, God bless my soul, you might bring down some unfortunate person in the next parish!" ”

“ He looked every inch the old soldier, even in a Jaeger suit of bedroom overalls, and I vastly preferred him to his two young men; but scholastic connections are not formed by picking and choosing your original material. Delavoye and I, however, made as free as they with the whisky bottle as a substitute for adequate clothing, and the one who had nearly committed manslaughter had some excuse in his depression and remorse.
"If I'd hit you," he said to Uvo, "I'd have blown my own silly brains out with the next chamber. I'm not kidding. I wouldn't shoot a man for twenty thousand pounds!" ”

“ A little knot of unsporting tenants seemed more disposed to complain of the disturbance than to take up the chase; but indeed that was hopeless in the fog and darkness, and before long Uvo and I were the only interlopers left. We remained by special invitation, for I had made friends with the colonel over the papering and painting of his house, while Uvo had just shown himself a would-be friend indeed.
"It's a very easy battle to reconstruct," said the crammer at the foot of his stairs. ”

“ It was generally held, however, that in presenting a predestined victim with a revolver and doctored cartridges, the master thief had gone too far, and that for that alone he deserved the exemplary sentence to which he listened like the officer and gentleman he had never been. So the great actor lives the part he plays.
It is a perquisite of witnesses to hear these popular trials with a certain degree of comfort; and so it was that I was able to nudge Uvo Delavoye, at the last soldierly inclination of that bald bad head, before it disappeared from a world to which it has not yet returned. ”

“ They're a most desperate gang of sportsmen, I assure you."
"There's certainly something to be said for keeping a revolver," observed Uvo, eyeing the brace now lying on the cast-iron chimneypiece.
"Do you mean to say you haven't got one?" cried Colonel Cheffins.
"I do. I wouldn't keep one even out in Egypt. I hate the beastly things," said Uvo Delavoye. ”

“ How many people out themselves for no earthly reason that anybody else can see, and have their memory insulted by the usual idiotic verdict? They're no more temporarily insane than I am. It's their curiosity that gets the better of them. ”

“ I suggested. "The fellow with one shoe won't take much overhauling?"
"No, Gilly," said Delavoye, abandoning the chase as incontinently as he had started it, but with equal decision; "I think it's about time to see what they've taken, as well as what they've left."
Their rope-ladder was still swaying from the bathroom window, and it served our turn again since Uvo was without his key. He climbed up first, and the window flared into a square of gas-light before I gained the sill. ”

“ Yet he railed about the bread of idleness, said a man should be fit or dead, and that his mother and sister would be better off without him. Those ladies were again from home, and the fact did not make it easier to dissociate such sayings from an unhealthy horror of loaded revolvers. ”

“ If they could take a return ticket, they would; they don't really want to go for good any more than I do. They're doing something they don't really want to do, yet can't help doing, as half of us are, half our time. ”

“ I—I couldn't, Gilly—not long!"
He had me quite tightly by the hand.
"I'm coming in with you," I said. "You're not fit to be alone."
"Oh, yes, I am!" he laughed. "I haven't got one of those things yet, and I shall never get one. I'd rather thieves broke in and stole every ounce of silver in the place."
So we parted for what was left of the night, instead of turning it into day as we often did with less excuse; and for once my powers of sleep deserted me. But it was not the attempted burglary, or any one of its sensational features, that kept me awake ”