"You're not trying to tell me that you believe any such hideous rot as that, are you?" I exploded, after we had left the camp well to the rear.
"God knows, I don't want to believe it, Preble; I pointedly don't believe the villainy charge. But the other hint—that Bonteck may be losing his grip on himself: we've all noticed it; you must have noticed it. And it is scaring the women no end. It is bad enough to have Ingerson around, licking his lips and wolfing every drop of liquor he can get his hands on; to have Barclay whining, and Miss Gilmore showing her claws, and the major grabbing for a little more than his share when he thinks nobody is looking. I have been trying hard to keep Annette from seeing and hearing. She has a perfectly childish horror of crazy people, Preble, and I—and we——" he broke down and choked over the thing that he was afraid to say, and I tightened my grip on his arm.
"Brace up!" I broke out harshly. "We don't have to say die until we're dead! You've got to brace up for Annette's sake. If she sees you crumbling it'll be all up with her—you know that much. Past that, you kill off this idiotic blether about Van Dyck every time you hear it. It's rot—the wildest tommyrot! Bonteck has his load to carry, and it's a good bit heavier than yours—or than mine, for that matter. He isn't losing his mind, and he hasn't been raiding the commissary. Say those two things over to yourself and to Annette until they sound real to you!"
Grey pulled his arm free, and I could fancy him swallowing hard once or twice.
"I want to be a man, in—in your sense of the word, Preble," he blurted out. "I used to be, I think, before—before Annette came and snuggled down into the empty place in my heart and made me see that it was up to me to carry the full cup of her sweet life without spilling a drop of it. But now—now when I look into her eyes and see the awful thing lying at the back of them—the thing that she's trying every minute of the day to keep me from seeing——"
He got this far before he choked up again, and now I couldn't be savage with him—which was what he was most needing.
"I know," I said, with a far keener sympathy than he suspected, for I, too, was seeing things in a pair of slate-blue eyes—eyes that were braver than Annette Grey's. "But we mustn't let down, John; we can't let down, you and I. When the pinches come, it's the man's privilege to buck up and carry the double load. That is one of the things we were made for." Then I tried to turn him aside from the most intimate of the threatenings. "About this smoke trail that the children saw: could they really tell which way it was heading?"
He shook his head.
"I am afraid not. They didn't see the ship; only the smoke. It was just at dusk, you know, and they wouldn't have seen anything at all but for the sunset glow in the west. It was quite dark when they came running back to the camp, and they were both so excited they couldn't talk straight."
"But they did see a smoke?"