"What do you mean?" snapped the general. "And why have you made
such a spectacle of yourself with all that beard? Why, I didn't
know you till you spoke--there's Walter there. What makes him
look like that?"
For Walter had just come out of the wood about fifty yards to their
right, and when he saw them talking together he understood at once
that in some way or another all his plans had failed.
He was looking at them through a gap in some undergrowth that hid
most of his body, but showed his head and shoulders plainly, and
as he stood there watching them his face was like a fiend's.
"Walter," the general shouted, and to his son Rupert he said: "The
boy's ill."
Walter moved forward from among the trees. He had a gun in his
hand, and he flung it forward as though preparing to fire, and at
the same moment Rupert Dunsmore drew from his pocket the pistol
Deede Dawson had given him and fired himself.
But at the very moment that he pulled the trigger the general
struck up his arm so that the bullet flew high and harmless through
the tops of the trees.
Walter stepped back again into the wood, and Rupert said:
"You don't know what you have done, father."
"You are mad, mad," the general gasped.
His face was very pale, and he trembled a little, for though he had
heard many bullets whistle by his ears, that had happened in action
against an enemy, and was altogether different from this.
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