I laughed again. “So you are to wear it?” I asked. “I’m sure I could not desire a better fellow officer. Yet I think you need not borrow trouble in advance, if it be Mr. Arnold you object to.”
He sat down and rested his elbows on the table, and tried to look me through and through with eyes that were only meant to see out of, and to be read by others.
“More mysteries,” he fumed. And then he added: “They are dangerous, Captain, most peculiarly dangerous for a man in your situation.”
“This is no mystery,” I replied boldly, never letting him loose the eyehold for an instant. “Have you never heard that Mr. Arnold’s health is most precarious? It is, I promise you; every one on the other side of the Neutral Ground knows it well. He will drop off very suddenly some day, Mr. Castner. I may go so far as to say, in strictest confidence to you, that I marked some of the symptoms while I was with him to-day.”
“You surprise me,” he said; but I saw that the nail was holding. Then he asked in a tone that was almost sympathetic, what the malady was.
“It has never been written out in any doctor’s book, I believe,” I rejoined gravely. “It is an obscure thing, coming suddenly and tying a man in knots, so that at the last he can move neither hand nor foot.”
I had him fairly mesmerized by this time, and his voice was hushed when he said: “And you say Mr. Arnold has this—this disease?”
“There is little doubt of it. Indeed, I overheard two men, officers they were in our—in the rebel army, speaking of it only last night, and, naturally, they were lamenting that it had not carried him off before he carried himself off. One of those men had known Mr. Arnold from the beginning, I believe.”
For a long minute Castner was silent, and he seemed to have forgotten the supper that the pretty serving maid had brought him. When he spoke he was plumbing me again with the honest eyes—or he thought he was.
“It is a hard thing to say, Captain Page,” he said, speaking like a man who has been digging in the very bottom layer of his convictions, “but sometimes I think that an outcome like this which you say is threatening would be the best for all concerned.”