Wiley sat in stunned silence, but his heart leapt up at this word of vindication for Honest John. To be sure his father had refused him help, and rebuked him for heckling the Widow, but loyalty ran strong in the Holman blood and he looked up at the Colonel and smiled.
275“Next time you go inside,” he said at last, “take a chance and ask your friend.”
“I’ll do that,” agreed the Colonel, “but it won’t be for some time because–well, I’m hiding out.”
“Here, too,” returned Wiley, “and I’m nevergoing back. But say, listen; I’ll tell you one now. You trusted your friend, and the bunch told you that he’d betrayed you; I trusted my girl, and she told me to my face that she’d sold me out for fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand, at the most; and I lost about a million and killed a man over it, to boot. You take a chance with your friends, but when you trust a woman–you don’t take any chance at all.”
“Ah, in self defense?” inquired the Colonel politely. “I thought I noticed a hole in your shirt. Yes, pretty close work–between your arm and your ribs. I’ve had a few close calls, myself.”
“Yes, but what do you think,” demanded Wiley impatiently, “of a girl that will throw you down like that? I gave her the stock and to make it worth the money she turned around and ditched me. And then she looked me in the face and laughed!”
“If you had studied,” observed the Colonel, “the Republic of Plato you would have been saved your initial mistake; for it was an axiom among the Greeks that in all things women are inferior, and never to be trusted in large affairs. The great Plato pointed out, and it has never been controverted, that women are given to concealment and 276spite; and that in times of danger they are timid and cowardly, and should therefore have no voice in council. In fact, in the ideal State which he conceived, they were to be herded by themselves in a community dwelling and held in common by the state. There were to be no wives and no husbands, with their quarrels and petty bickerings, but the women were to be parceled out by certain controllers of marriage and required to breed men for the state. That is going rather far, and I hardly subscribe to it, but I think they should be kept in their place.”
“Well, they are cowardly, all right,” agreed Wiley bitterly, “but that’s better than when they fight. Because then, if you oppose them, everybody turns against you; and if you don’t, they’ve got you whipped!”
“Put it there!” exclaimed the Colonel, striking hands with him dramatically. “I swear, we shall get along famously. There is nothing I admire more than a gentle, modest woman, an ornament to her husband and her home; but when she puts on the trousers and presumes to question and dictate, what is there left for a gentleman to do? He cannot strike her, for she is his wife and he has sworn to cherish and protect her; and yet, by the gods, she can make his life more miserable than a dozen quarrelsome men. What is there to do but what I have done–to close up my affairs and depart? If there is such a thing as love, long absence may renew it, and the sorrow may chasten her heart; 277but I agree with Solomon that it is better to dwell in a corner of the house-top than with a scolding woman in a wide house.”
“You bet,” nodded Wiley. “Gimme the desert solitude, every time. Is there any more whiskey in that bottle?”