His face was expressionless; he concealed the joy that this mood of his master aroused in his thin breast. Jim did not like the Park, and only the recollection of one 136 day when he had stood tied to a capstan on a pirate junk, with a dozen fiends around him trying to make him tell something he did not know, and Haig had suddenly descended upon them like the foreign devil he was,––well, Jim took his gods where he found them, and from that day Haig had never been able to rid himself of this idolater.
“Tien-Tsin! Tien-Tsin!” Haig repeated, lingering covetously on the words. “But that was a fight, eh!”
“No likee!” replied Jim.
“No likee!” cried Haig. “Why, you hypocritical young ruffian, you! That was one of the happiest nights of your life. You’re always trying to make people think you’re asleep, or timid. I can see, right now, that long knife of yours slip under my arm, and catch the big fellow in the stomach. He just coughed once, and crumpled up at my feet. In the nick of time, too, Jim, and I let the next one have it. The rest of them took to their heels, and you with your long pigsticker after them. No likee! Jim, you’re a moon-faced old liar, and a disgrace to your ten thousand and seven ancestors.”
Jim’s smile was perfectly noncommittal. He was too wily to appear eager. Besides, he did not really like fighting, which made all the more trouble for somebody when he had to fight. But he was heartily sick of this cold and uneventful life in the Park. Better a thousand times the foolish adventures, the unnecessary battles, the restless wanderings of other days!
“That was a night!” said Haig, flinging himself back in his chair to gaze dreamily into the flames, while Jim, like a blue ghost, stole noiselessly away. And there, 137 in the glow of the dying fire, bright and alluring visions successively took shape: A red-and-yellow temple on a hill, to which a thousand steps led up from a lake the color of a blue heron’s breast; a junk with sails of purple creeping out of a morning mist as yellow as saffron; an island with a still lagoon in its center, and coconut palms alive with screaming parrots of every gorgeous hue; a sandy beach where jabbering natives dragged the flotsam of a wrecked steamer out of the breakers; a village on a high plateau, where a drum throbbed incessantly, and naked Indian children peered out from behind the huts; a skirmish line in khaki crawling up to the brow of a shell-swept hill; a dog-team yelping under the long lash of a half-breed Aleut, on a frozen river that sparkled in the sun; a sweating jungle where two bright spots glowed balefully in the gloom.
“God!” groaned Haig, as he sat erect at last, and reached for the glass, now cold. He tasted it, and set it back with a wry face.
“Damn Thursby!” he muttered. “Does he think I’m going to stay here forever, like a bear in a pit?”
He woke the next morning in an ugly humor, having slept little, and then only to dream such dreams as fed his discontent. He berated Jim because the biscuits were cold (which was not Jim’s fault), and because the coffee was hot (which was according to his orders). Trivial annoyances, most of them of his own making or imagining, multiplied on all sides, fomenting his irritability until, by the time he strode out of the cottage, his temper was at white heat. What might have happened to the patient, devoted men about the 138 stable and corrals is not difficult of conjecture, but they were saved by Sunnysides. Almost the first object that caught Haig’s eye was the yellow outlaw gleaming in the morning sunlight.
“Ah!” he exclaimed.