Only Hammond himself did not think it good enough to stay on with his bride in a country which seemed to him unsettled and breathing of war, and he did not hesitate to state his intentions in spite of jeers.
“Why, hello, Marie!” they mocked him at the Club, and quoted remarks from the Gadsbys:
“White hands cling to the bridle rein!”
“You may carve it on his tombstone, you may cut it on his card,
That a young man married is a young man marred,” etc.
“That’s all right,” laughed Hammond serenely. “But I’ll take a year off for my honeymoon just the same, and you fellows can put things straight with the niggers. Afterwards, I’ll come back and congratulate you and bring up the new machinery for the Carissima.”
The Carissima Gold Mine belonged to Hammond and Carr and Girder, and looked like panning out wealth untold in the near future.
“Oh, you’re crazy, Marie,” said Billy Blake, Head of the Mounted Police, striving to be patient with the renegade. “Love has gone to your head. There isn’t going to be any row with the natives. Compose yourself, my son.”
Hammond composed himself as requested in a large lounge chair, his feet on another. Leisurely, and with obvious enjoyment of his pipe he explained that in his opinion Love and War were each good and great and highly desirable things, but he preferred them separate.
“They don’t mix,” said he; “so we’ll divide them this time. You can have the war all to yourself, Blake, and I’ll—” he flushed under his copper skin and added gravely, for he made and took no jests on the subject of his amazing happiness, “It’s a long time since I’ve seen Kentucky—I’ll take a trip home.”
“Oh, you ought to take medicine, Marie—”
“Take a rest—”