“It’d worry me too much to tell you now. It’s tied up in a skein.”
He muttered something to himself and mused darkly, and roused himself to say—
“Besides—you’d better keep out of it. It’s getting tight. Get ’em talking. Go down to Crest Hill and fly. That’s your affair.”
For a time his manner set free queer anxieties in my brain again.
I will confess that that Mordet Island nightmare of mine returned, and as I looked at him his hand went out for the drug again. “Stomach, George,” he said.
“I been fightin’ on that. Every man fights on some thing—gives way somewheres—head, heart, liver—something. Zzzz. Gives way somewhere. Napoleon did at last. All through the Waterloo campaign, his stomach—it wasn’t a stomach! Worse than mine, no end.”
The mood of depression passed as the drug worked within him. His eyes brightened. He began to talk big. He began to dress up the situation for my eyes, to recover what he had admitted to me. He put it as a retreat from Russia. There were still the chances of Leipzig.
“It’s a battle, George—a big fight. We’re fighting for millions. I’ve still chances. There’s still a card or so. I can’t tell all my plans—like speaking on the stroke.”
“You might,” I began.
“I can’t, George. It’s like asking to look at some embryo. You got to wait. I know. In a sort of way, I know. But to tell it—No! You been away so long. And everything’s got complicated.”