"Till he cut a brother of mine out with Rachel, and shot him in the woods of Chantilly for flaring-up rough at the rivalry. Charlie was rather a good fellow, and Dash and I didn't speak after that, you see. Great bore; bosh too, perhaps. Dash brews the best Curaçoa punch in Europe, and if he name you the winning mount for the Granby, you may let the talent damn you as they like. Still you know as he killed Charlie,--" and the Guardsman stuck a great cheroot in his mouth, in doubt as to whether, after all, it wasn't humbug, and an uncalled-for sacrifice, rather scenic and sentimental, to drop an expert at Curaçoa brew, and a sure prophet for Croxton Park, just because in a legitimate fashion he had potted your brother and relieved your entail;--on the whole, a friendly act rather than otherwise? "Keep clear of the Killer, though, young one," he added, as he sauntered out. "He's like that cheetah cub of Berkeley's; soft as silk, you know, _patte de velours_, and what d'ye call 'em, and all the rest of it, but deucedly deadly to deal with."
I did know: it was the eternal refrain that was heard on all sides; from the wily Jews through whose meshes he slipped; the unhappy duns who were done by him; the beauties who were bewitched by him; the hosts and husbands who, having him down for the pheasants, found him poach other preserves than those of the cover-sides; the women who had their characters shattered by a silvery sneer from a voice that was as soft, in its murderous slander, as in its equally murderous wooing; and all the rest, who, in some shape or another, owed ruin to that Apollo Apollyon--Deadly Dash. Ruin which at last became so wide and so deep, that even vice began to look virtuous when his name was mentioned (vice always does when she thinks you are really cleared out), and men of his own corps and his own club began to get shy of having the Killer's arm linked in theirs too often down Pall Mall, for its wrist was terribly steady in either Hazard, whether of the yard of green table or the twenty yards of green turf.
At last the crisis came: the Killer killed one too many; a Russian Prince in the Bois de Vincennes, in a quarrel about a pretty wretched little chorus-singer of the Café Alcazar, who took their fancies both at once. The _mondes_ thought it terribly wicked, not the deed you know, but the audacity of a cavalry man's having potted a Very Serene High Mightiness. In a Duke, all these crimes and crimcons, though as scarlet, would have been held but the crimson gold-dotted fruit adorning the strawberry-leaves; Deadly Dash, a Light Dragoon whose name was signed to plenty of "floating little bills," could not bid high enough to purchase his pardon from society, which says to its sinners with austere front of virtue, "Oblivion cannot be hired,--unless," adds Society, dropping to mellowest murmur her whisper, "unless you can give us a premium!" So Dash, with a certain irresistible though private pressure upon him from the Horse Guards--sent in his papers to sell. What had been done so often could not now be done again; the first steeple-chaser in the Service could not at last even save his stake, but was finally, irretrievably, struck out.