“Oh, not at all. It seems very dark around.”
“Will you take my arm? The path is steep and worn, and here is a small matter of a river, as you see. I regret that the water is perhaps a trifle cold. Yes, one hears so much talk about the other side that one hardly knows what to think. There is no hurry. But at this point I say good night and leave you. When you were young you often heard good night said when the morning was at hand. May it be so. Good night.”
NAUSICAA
The Fourteenth Infantry, volunteers, were mustered out on the last day of April. Sandy Cass and Kid Sadler came that night into the great city of the river and the straits with their heads full of lurid visions which they set about immediately to realize. Little Irish was with them, and Bill Smith, who had had other names at other times. And Sandy woke the next morning in a room that had no furniture but a bed, a washstand, a cracked mirror, and a chair. He did not remember coming there. Some one must have put him to bed. It was not Kid Sadler or Little Irish; they were drunk early, with bad judgment. It must have been Bill Smith. A hat with a frayed cord lay on the floor. “That's Bill's hat,” he said. “He's got mine.”
The gray morning filled the window, and carts rattled by in the street. He rose and drank from the pitcher to clear the bitterness from his mouth, and saw himself in the glass, haggard and holloweyed. It was a clean-cut face, with straight, thin lips, straight eyebrows, and brown hair. The lips were white and lines ran back from the eyes. Sandy did not think he looked a credit to himself.
“Some of it's yellow fever,” he reflected, “and some of it's jag. About half and half. The squire can charge it to the yellow.”
He wondered what new thing Squire Cass would find to say to his “rascally nephew, that reprobate Ulysses.” Squire Cass was a red-faced gentleman and substantial citizen of that calm New England town of Wimberton, which Sandy knew very well and did not care for. It was too calm. But it would be good for his constitution to go there now. He wondered if his constitution would hold out for another night equally joyful; “Maybe it might;” then how much of his eighty dollars' back pay was blown in. He put on his clothes slowly, feeling through the pockets, collected two half-dollars on the way, came to the last and stopped.
“Must have missed one;” and began again. But that crumpled wad of bills was gone altogether. “Well, if I ain't an orphan!”