“Do you know, Major, I begin to wish I had left you where you were. It’s a fact that you’re making a perfect fool of me, and I wish you’d drop it.”
“Shucks! Now you quit that fool-talk, John Ames, and reach down that whisky over there—if you can call such drug-store mixture as your Scotch stuff by the same name as real old Kentucky. I’m going on at it until they give you that little nickel thing you British think such a heap of.”
“But I don’t want it, can’t you understand?” he retorted angrily; “nor anything else either. I believe I’ll get out of this country mighty soon. I’m sick of the whole show.”
Shackleton looked at his friend, and shook his head gravely. John Ames petulant, meant something very wrong indeed with John Ames. Then an idea struck “The Major”—a bright idea, he reckoned—and in the result he seized an early opportunity of making a call, and during that call he retold his favourite tale to just two persons—to one of whom it was pleasant and to one of whom it was not. You see, he was a shrewd observer, was Shackleton, otherwise “The Major.”
Chapter Twenty Eight.
The King and the Age.
“Do try and be serious a little while if you can, Nidia, if only that I have something very serious to say to you.”
“Drive ahead, then, Govvie. I promise not even to laugh.”