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How else could the deathly pallor of her countenance while she fixed her eyes wide and unmoving upon his face, and the flush that ever and anon swept its red shadow over the pallor as she cast them on the ground at some brave word from the lips of the canting psalm-singer, be in the least intelligible? Then came the difficulty: how in that case was her share in his capture to be explained?
"That's all I have to say," he added; and he stalked out of the house, in spite of the host's request for him to remain, without giving a word or even a look to Donald. "I am astonished," said Captain Patterdale. "Can it be possible that he paid that bill to Laud?" Perhaps this was the joke of the strange man simply to confuse and confound a "psalm-singer."
"The boss must be a good man, him being a sort of psalm-singer," Bill ventured, guilelessly. Denny snorted: "Oh, sure! He's good, all right. He's 'most too good to be true. Billy, my boy, when you've seen as many crooks as I have you'll know 'em, no matter how they come dressed." As he folded the cot Mr. Hyde opined that worldly experience must indeed be a fine thing to possess.
I found my old admiral was a psalm-singer; so says I, 'my old boy, I'll give you enough of that, so I made the boatswain stuff me a hassock, and this I carried with me every where, that I might save my trowsers, and not hurt my knees; so then I turned to and prayed all day long, and kept the people awake, singing psalms all night.
"Ah!" broke in Mulvaney, "ye'd no chanst against the maraudin' psalm-singer. They'll take the airs an' the graces instid av the man nine times out av ten, an' they only find the blunder later the wimmen." "That's just where yo're wrong," said Learoyd, reddening under the freckled tan of his cheeks. "I was th' first wi' 'Liza, an' yo'd think that were enough.
'A canting hypocrite, a psalm-singer and devil-dodger, he has no civilization worth the name, and his customs are filthy. Since the great trek he has acquired, from long intercourse with his Kaffir slaves, many of the native's savage traits. In short, a born liar, credulous and barbarous, crassly ignorant and inconceivably stubborn.
Sim Hicks, the keeper of the Inn, began an open fight against Mr. McGowan's intrusions, declaring he would make good a former threat to oust the "Psalm-singer" from the village. One evening Mr. McGowan returned to his study deeply perplexed. What was the meaning in the unjust persecution? Not that he complained; his difficulty was rather his inability to get at the bottom of it all.
"Sarvitude is sarvitude all over the world, my old psalm-singer," replied one. "They sarve their masters, as in duty bound; we sarve the King, 'cause he can't do without us and he never axes our leave, but helps himself." Then the purser's steward came out; he was what they call a bit of a lawyer, that is, had received more education than the seamen in general.
The farmer's toil had hardly yet begun, the winter's hunt being just concluded, and each of the stationers with a string of led horses was bound for his camps and caches to bring in the skins that made the profit of the season. One of this group of three was the psalm-singer of the blockhouse.
'So saying, I picked the body up in my arms, and bearing it to a wayside clump of yellow gorse bushes, I laid it solemnly down and drew the branches over it to conceal it. 'You have the thews of an ox and the heart of a woman, 'muttered my companion. 'By the Mass, that old white-headed psalm-singer was right; for if my memory serves me, he said words to that effect.
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