I knew the impossibility of questioning the authority to which I had pledged obedience.

I realised with great amazement the fact that a secondary position on my own estate, and a personal charge of my own safety, had been accepted by a Chief of the Zinta.
"There is, of course," I replied at last, "no answer to a mandate so enforced.

But, Chief, reluctant as I am to say it, I fear--fear as I have never done before; and yet fear I cannot say, I cannot guess what." "There is no cause for alarm," he said somewhat contemptuously.

"In this journey, sudden, speedy, and made under our guard as on our summons, there is little or none of that peril which has beset you so long." "You forget, Chief," I rejoined, "that you speak to a soldier, whose chosen trade was to risk life at the word of a superior; to one whose youth thought no smile so bright as that of naked steel, and had often 'kissed the lips of the lightning' ere the down darkened his own.

At any rate, you have told me daily for more than a year that I am living under constant peril of assassination; have I seemed to quail thereat?
If, then, I am now terrified for the first time, that which I dread, without knowing or dreaming what it is, is assuredly a peril worse than any I have known, the shadow of a calamity against which I have neither weapon nor courage.