A few minutes later he lay upon a heap of magnolia branches breathing his life away. At the same moment of time that a rough but kindly hand closed the eyes of the bushranger, the woman from The Angel’s Rest and Louis Bachelor saw the pale face of Roadmaster peer through the bedroom window at Barbara Golding sitting in a chair asleep; and she started and said through her half-wakefulness, looking at the window: “Where are you going, Edward?”
THE LONE CORVETTE
“And God shall turn upon them violently, and toss them like a ball
into a large country.”—ISAIH.
“Poor Ted, poor Ted! I’d give my commission to see him once again.”
“I believe you would, Debney.”
“I knew him to the last button of his nature, and any one who knew him well could never think hardly of him. There were five of us brothers, and we all worshipped him. He could run rings round us in everything, at school, with sports, in the business of life, in love.”
Debney’s voice fell with the last few words, and there was a sorrowful sort of smile on his face. His look was fastened on the Farilone Islands, which lay like a black, half-closed eyelid across the disc of the huge yellow sun, as it sank in the sky straight out from the Golden Gate. The long wash of the Pacific was in their ears at their left, behind them was the Presidio, from which they had come after a visit to the officers, and before them was the warm, inviting distance of waters, which lead, as all men know, to the Lotos Isles.
Debney sighed and shook his head. “He was, by nature, the ablest man I ever knew. Everything in the world interested him.”
“There lay the trouble, perhaps.”