“I don’t stand it. I lie down and let it roll over me. If I ever thought about it at all I’d lose my grip. Sometimes a longing to be again in the jungle sweeps over me—to feel its dangers—its security—its genuineness and freedom from all shams, if you will”—and a strange haunting look settled in his eyes.
“But you always used to dream of getting home; I’ve lain awake by the hour and heard you talk.”
“Yes, I know,” he answered rousing himself, “it was a battle even in those days. I would think about it and then decide to stay a year or two longer; and then the hunger for home would come upon me again and I’d begin to shape things so I could get back to England. Sometimes it took a year to decide—sometimes two or three—for you can’t get rid of that kind of a nightmare in a minute.”
“You were different from me, Herbert,” remarked Le Blanc. “You went to the wilds because you loved them; I went because they locked the front and back gates on me. I suppose I deserved it, for nobody got much sleep when I was twenty. But it sounds funny to have you say it would take you two years to make up your mind whether you’d come home or not. It wouldn’t have taken me five seconds.”
“Sometimes it didn’t take that long,” and a quick laugh escaped Herbert’s lips as if to conceal his serious mood. “Those things depend on how you feel and what has started your thinking apparatus to working. I walked out of a kraal in Australia one summer’s night when the home-hunger was on me and never stopped until I reached Sydney—the last hundred miles barefoot. You must have known about it, for I met you right after”—and he turned to The Engineer, who nodded in an amused way. “That was before we struck Borneo, if I remember?”
“Why barefooted, Herbert?” asked Louis, hitching his chair the closer.
“Because the soles and heels were gone and the uppers were all that were left.”
“Tell them about it, Herbert,” remarked The Engineer with a smile, pulling away at his pipe.
“Oh, if you would, Monsieur Herbert! I tried to tell Monsieur High-Muck about it the night you arrived, but Monsieur Louis’ horn put it out of my head. It is better that he hears it from you”—and the old man’s lip quivered, his face lighting up with admiration. Herbert was his high-priest in matters of this kind.
“There is really nothing to tell,” returned Herbert. “I was tending cattle for a herdsman at the time up in the hills—I and a friend of mine. We had both run away from our ships and were trying the rolling country for a change, when one of those irresistible, overwhelming attacks of homesickness seized me, and without caring a picayune what became of me, I turned short on my tracks and struck out for the coast. A man does that sort of thing sometimes. I had no money and only the clothes on my back, but I knew the railroad was some forty miles away, and that when I reached it I could work my passage into civilization and from there on to London.