“I am well, sir.”
“I—didn’t know,” said the man again, throwing an aggressive resentment into his tone; “you seemed preoccupied.”
“I was,” replied the Doctor, returning his glance with so keen an eye that the man smiled again, appeasingly. “I was thinking how barely skin-deep civilization is.”
The man ha-ha’d artificially, stepping backward as he said, “That’s so!” He looked after the departing Doctor an instant and then joined his companions.
Richling had a touch of this contagion. He looked from Garibaldi to Walker and back again, and could not see any enormous difference between them. He said as much to one of the bakery’s customers, a restaurateur with a well-oiled tongue, who had praised him for his intrepidity in the rescue of the medal-peddler, which, it seems, he had witnessed. With this praise still upon his lips the caterer walked with Richling to the restaurant door, and detained him there to enlarge upon the subject of Spanish-American misrule, and the golden rewards that must naturally fall to those who should supplant it with stable government. Richling listened and replied and replied again and listened; and presently the restaurateur startled him with an offer to secure him a captain’s commission under Walker. He laughed incredulously; but the restaurateur, very much in earnest, talked on; and by littles, but rapidly, Richling admitted the value of the various considerations urged. Two or three months of rapid adventure; complete physical renovation—of course—natural sequence; the plaudits of a grateful people; maybe fortune also, but at least a certainty of finding the road to it,—all this to meet Mary with next fall.
“I’m in a great hurry just now,” said Richling; “but I’ll talk about this thing with you again to-morrow or next day,” and so left.
The restaurateur turned to his head-waiter, stuck his tongue in his cheek, and pulled down the lower lid of an eye with his forefinger. He meant to say he had been lying for the pure fun of it.
When Dr. Sevier came that afternoon to see Reisen—of whom there was now but little left, and that little unable to leave the bed—Richling took occasion to raise the subject that had entangled his fancy. He was careful to say nothing of himself or the restaurateur, or anything, indeed, but a timid generality or two. But the Doctor responded with a clear, sudden energy that, when he was gone, left Richling feeling painfully blank, and yet unable to find anything to resent except the Doctor’s superfluous—as he thought, quite superfluous—mention of the island of Cozumel.
However, and after all, that which for the most part kept the public mind heated was, as we have said, the political campaign. Popular feeling grew tremulous with it as the landscape did under the burning sun. It was a very hot summer. Not a good one for feeble folk; and one early dawn poor Reisen suddenly felt all his reason come back to him, opened his eyes, and lo! he had crossed the river in the night, and was on the other side.
Dr. Sevier’s experienced horse halted of his own will to let a procession pass. In the carriage at its head the physician saw the little rector, sitting beside a man of German ecclesiastical appearance. Behind it followed a majestic hearse, drawn by black-plumed and caparisoned horses,—four of them. Then came a long line of red-shirted firemen; for he in the hearse had been an “exempt.” Then a further line of big-handed, white-gloved men in beavers and regalias; for he had been also a Freemason and an Odd-fellow. Then another column, of emotionless-visaged German women, all in bunchy black gowns, walking out of time to the solemn roll and pulse of the muffled drums, and the brazen peals of the funeral march. A few carriages closed the long line. In the first of them the waiting Doctor marked, with a sudden understanding of all, the pale face of John Richling, and by his side the widow who had been forty years a wife,—weary and red with weeping. The Doctor took off his hat.