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“Won’t it, indeed, sir? Rather a bad look-out for me!” Mr. George good-humoredly observed.

“You must have a lawyer,” pursued my guardian. “We must engage a good one for you.”

“I ask your pardon, sir,” said Mr. George, with a step backward. “I am equally obliged. But I must decidedly beg to be excused from anything of that sort.”

“You won’t have a lawyer?”

“No, sir.” Mr. George shook his head in the most emphatic manner. “I thank you all the same, sir, but—no lawyer!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t take kindly to the breed,” said Mr. George. “Gridley didn’t. And—if you’ll excuse my saying so much—I should hardly have thought you did yourself, sir.”

“That’s Equity,” my guardian explained, a little at a loss; “that’s Equity, George.”

“Is it indeed, sir?” returned the trooper, in his off-hand manner. “I am not acquainted with those shades of names myself, but in a general way I object to the breed.”

Unfolding his arms, and changing his position, he stood with one massive hand upon the table, and the other on his hip, as complete a picture of a man who was not to be moved from a fixed purpose as ever I saw. It was in vain that we all three talked to him, and endeavoured to persuade him; he listened with that gentleness which went so well with his bluff bearing, but was evidently no more shaken by our representations than his place of confinement was.

“Pray think, once more, Mr. George,” said I. “Have you no wish, in reference to your case?”

“I certainly could wish it to be tried, miss,” he returned, “by court-martial; but that is out of the question, as I am well aware. If you will be so good as to favour me with your attention for a couple of minutes, miss, not more, I’ll endeavour to explain myself as clearly as I can.”

He looked at us all three in turn, shook his head a little as if he were adjusting it in the stock and collar of a tight uniform, and after a moment’s reflection went on.

“You see, miss, I have been hand-cuffed and taken into custody, and brought here. I am a marked and disgraced man, and here I am. My shooting-gallery is rummaged, high and low, by Bucket; such property as I have—’tis small—is turned this way and that, till it don’t know itself; and (as aforesaid) here I am! I don’t particular complain of that. Though I am in these present quarters through no immediately preceding fault of mine, I can very well understand that if I hadn’t gone into the vagabond way in my youth, this wouldn’t have happened. It has happened. Then comes the question, how to meet it.”

He rubbed his swarthy forehead for a moment, with a good-humored look, and said apologetically, “I am such a short-winded talker that I must think a bit.” Having thought a bit, he looked up again, and resumed.

“How to meet it. Now, the unfortunate deceased was himself a