“Dash it all, Lamont! Why don’t you turn in, man? You’re overdoing it, you know. You haven’t had forty winks for about four nights. You’ll bust up all of a sudden, and at the wrong time, if you don’t watch it. How’s that?”
Thus Peters, what time the tired and worn-out men were simply subsiding on the bare ground, and dropping off into log-like slumber the moment they touched it; and that under the glorious blue of the heavens and the sweeping gold of the newly risen sun.
“I couldn’t sleep, Peters—no, not if I were paid to,” was the answer. “But I’m going to see if I can scare up a tub and a razor. At present I must be looking the most desperate ruffian you could not wish to meet in a lonely lane.”
Peters looked after him and shook his head, slowly and mournfully.
“He’s got it,” he said to himself. “By the Lord, he’s got it. I could see that when, like the blithering ass I am, I interrupted them that evening. No, it isn’t sheer aptitude for tough campaigning that keeps his peepers open when nobody else can keep theirs.”
Peters was absolutely right. His friend and comrade was in a state of mental exaltation that reacted physically. He could hardly believe in his happiness, even yet. How had it come about? In his pride and cynicism it might have been months before he would have brought matters to the testing point—it is even conceivable it might have been never. Yet, all unpremeditated and on the spur of the moment, he had done so—and now, and now—
Good Heavens! life was too golden henceforward, and as the flaming wheel of the sun rose higher and higher in the unflecked blue, the glory of the newborn day seemed to Lamont to attune itself to the glow of happiness and peace which had settled down upon his whole being. The bloodshed and strife and massacre! of which he had been a witness, was as a thing outside, a thing put completely behind.
It was decided that no move should be made that day. A bare suggestion that they should attempt the return to Gandela revived all poor Lucy Fullerton’s terrors. She would sooner die at once, she declared, than go through the horrors of yesterday all over again.
“Yes, you seemed to have got the funks to some considerable purpose,” grumbled Fullerton. “Hang it, Lucy, I thought you had more pluck. Look at Clare, now. She was positively enjoying it.”
“Oh no, she wasn’t,” corrected that young person, who had just entered. “No, not in the very least. But I suppose different people take on different forms of scare. Mine took that of a sort of desperate excitement.”