"Why, Hollins has been missing now ever since the 18th of September, and he must be either dead or taken prisoner."
The adjutant looks around him, and, seeing other officers and men within earshot, though generally occupied with their morning ablutions, he comes closer to his comrade of the line and the two who have joined him, and speaks with lowered voice.
"There is some investigation going on. The colonel sent for such books and papers of Hollins's as could be found about camp, and an order came last night for Captain Dodge to report at once at Frederick. He was better acquainted with Hollins than any one else—among the officers anyway—and he knew something about his whereabouts the other times he was missing. This makes the third."
"Three times and out, say I," answers one of the party. "I heard some talk at division headquarters when I was up there last night: the general has a letter that Colonel Raymond wrote soon after he was exchanged, but if it be anything to Hollins's discredit I wonder he did not write to Putnam. He wouldn't want his successor to be burdened with a quartermaster whom he knew to be—well—shady, so to speak."
"That's the one thing I never understood about Abbot," says the captain, sipping the cup of coffee that a negro servant had just brought to him. "Some more of that, Belshazzar; these gentlemen will join me. How he, who is so blue-blooded, seems to be on such terms of intimacy with Hollins is what I mean," he explains. "It was through him that Hollins was taken into companionship from the very start. He really is responsible for him. They were class-mates, and no one else knew anything of him—except vaguely."
"Now there's just where you wrong Abbot, captain," answers Mr. Hunnewell, very promptly, "and I want to hit that nail on the head right here. I thought just as you did, for a while; but got an inkling as to the real state of the case some time ago. It wasn't Abbot who endorsed him at all, except by silence and sufferance, you may say. Hollins was at his tent day and night—always following him up and actually forcing himself upon him; and one night, after Hollins had that first scrape, and came back under a cloud and went to Abbot first thing to intercede with the colonel, I happened to overhear a piece of conversation between them. Abbot was just as cold and distant as man could possibly be. He told him plainly that he considered his course discreditable to the whole regiment, and especially annoying to him, because, said Abbot, 'You have virtually made me your sponsor with every man who showed a disposition to repel you.' Then Hollins made some reply which I did not fully catch, but Abbot was angry, and anybody could have heard his answer. He told Hollins that if it had not been for the relationship to which he alluded he could not have tolerated him at all, but that he must not draw on it too often. Then Hollins came out, and I heard him muttering to himself. He fawned on Abbot while he was in the tent, but he was scowling and gritting his teeth when he left; and I heard him cursing sotto voce, until he suddenly caught sight of me. Then he was all joviality, and took me by the arms to tell me how 'Paul, old boy, has been raking me over the coals. We were chums, you know, and he thinks a heap of me, and don't want the home people to know of my getting on a spree,' was the way he explained it. Now, if you remember, it was Hollins who was perpetually alluding to his intimacy with the Abbots. Paul himself never spoke of it. What Palfrey once told me in Washington may explain it; he said that Hollins was distantly related to the Winthrops, and that there was a time when he and Miss Winthrop were quite inseparable—you know what a handsome fellow he was when he first joined us?"
"Well," answers the captain, with the half-way and reluctant withdrawal of the average man who has made an unjust statement, "it may be as you say, but all the same it was Abbot's tacit endorsement or tolerance that enabled Hollins to hold a place among us as long as he has. If he has been sheltered under the shadow of Abbot's wing, and turns out to be a vagabond, so much the worse for the wing. All the same, I'm glad of Abbot's promotion. Wonder whose staff he goes on?"
"Lieutenant," says a corporal, saluting the group and addressing his company commander, "Rix says he would like to speak with the major before breakfast. He was for going to headquarters alone just now, but I told him he must wait until I had seen you."
The lieutenant glances quickly around. There, not ten paces away—his forage cap on the back of his head, his hulking shoulders more bent than ever, hands in his pockets and a scowl on his face—stands, or rather slouches, Rix. He looks unkempt, dirty, determinedly ugly, and very much as though he had been in liquor most of the week, and was sober now only through adverse circumstances over which he had no control.
"What do you want of the major, Rix?" demands the lieutenant, with military directness.