“Well, it doesn’t matter. He’s gone.”
“No, he has not,” said Joe, quietly. “He has been hanging about here ever since he left six months ago.”
“What! I’ve never seen him.”
“I have, and he has spoken to me over and over again.”
“Why, you never told me.”
“No, but I thought a good deal about it.”
“What did he say to you?”
“That it was very hard for a man who had done his best for the mine to be turned away all of a sudden just because Sam Hardock and the fellows hated him.”
“He wouldn’t have been turned away for that. But as father said, when a man strikes his superior officer he must be punished, or there would be no discipline in a corps.”
“I daresay Sam Hardock exasperated him first.”