Look at this, now." He bared his chest and showed me a puckered wound over the region of the heart.
"That's where the jezail bullet of a Hillman went in.

You would think that was in the right spot to settle a man, and yet what does it do but glance upon a rib, and go clean round and out at the back, without so much as penetrating what you medicos call the pleura.

Did ever you hear of such a thing ?" "You were certainly born under a lucky star," I observed, with a smile.
"That's a matter of opinion," he answered, shaking his head.

"Death has no terrors for me, if it will but come in some familiar form, but I confess that the anticipation of some strange, some preternatural form of death is very terrible and unnerving." "You mean," said I, rather puzzled at his remark, "that you would prefer a natural death to a death by violence ?" "No, I don't mean that exactly," he answered.

"I am too familiar with cold steel and lead to be afraid of either.