“UPON my word, the dashed brute—excuse my language, Miss Sedgwick—measured sixteen feet four inches from his whiskers to the tip of his tail, and weighed close on fifteen hundredweight, and killed—killed, mind you—stone dead with a twelve-bore shotgun at five paces. How’s that for a tiger?” and “Colonel” Rickaby drained the remnants of his whiskey and soda, his “chota peg” as he called it, with as much satisfaction as if he had just performed the deed.
“How’s that Padre, for a tiger?” he repeated, blowing out his walrus mustache, and turning his prominent eyes on the lean man in the Roman collar sitting opposite.
He met with no response. The padre appeared not even to have heard him, but sat silent, staring at the untasted food on his plate, one hand playing with a little gold cross he w
