"I think, my boy," he said, as though he had never been away at all, "we can run to a dress suit."
CHAPTER XXX
A moment later the two men stood with their hands clasped, and the face of the younger was aglow with such delight as can come only from a happy windfall out of the unexpected.
Never had that other face and figure been far from his thoughts. Never had his ardent hero-worship waned or tarnished. His speculations and dreams had been haunted by misgivings bred of the fierce chances of war, chances which might make of the features, into which he now looked again, only a memory.
New and varied activities in his life had bulwarked him against actual brooding, and youth is too brightly hopeful to accept grim possibilities, unproven; but the mists of denied fear had hung undissolved, and there had been moments when they had thickened and congealed on the crystal of his thoughts to dark foreboding.
He had not known with what name or rank his beloved preceptor had been serving over there beyond the Pacific. Many officers had fallen, and McCalloway was not one to turn half aside from any danger. If he had been among the lost, Boone might never have known. Even his torture of mind over Asa had been free of this intolerable character of suspense. Now it was lifted, and without a forerunner of hint the man stood there before him in the flesh, smiling and talking of a dress suit!
"I can't believe it, sir," Boone stammered, and McCalloway's ruddy face became quizzical.
"Had you made up your mind to lose me, then?" he inquired.
Much they had in common at that moment of reunion, and one thing in antithesis. Boone thought of his lost race and was smitten with a pang of failure to report, but McCalloway was reading the clarity of bold and honest eyes: of a face to which it was given to wear the karat-mark of dauntlessness and integrity, and at the end of his gaze he gave an unuttered summary of what he had read: "Clean as a hound's tooth—and as strong."