Bull dropped his hands, revealing bleared eyes and swollen face to the correspondent’s gaze. “Well! well! Up and bright as a cricket! You went it some in El Paso, Diogenes; but—last night!” He shook his head in mock reproof.
“What did you do? What didn’t you do? Drank up all the whisky here, then went out and tried to dry up the cantinas. A few are still in business—those you didn’t break up. It took a troop to round you up. They had you stuck against a wall when Enrico, my amigo, happened along. Remembering that he had seen you with me, he brought you over here.”
“Well, I’m sorry! damned sorry that he did!” Bull shrugged. “On’y to be shot, like a soldier, would be too good a death for me. My kind smother in the gutter.”
His bitterness touched the other. “Look here, old man, don’t take it so hard. We all of us have our slips. The only thing to do is to get up and go on again.”
Underneath his first lightness and present sympathy a heavier feeling had made itself felt. Bull had stretched out again on the cot, and now, as he stood looking down upon him, the correspondent’s face grew grave. Once he opened his lips; then, unconsciously, Bull opened the way.
“Where’s Benson?” He looked up. “Did he go again to Valles?”
“Unfortunately, yes. His consul warned him against it—without avail. What happened we can only guess. You know his temper; remember what he said on the train. Perhaps he threatened Valles. He could not have done much more, for he left his guns in the car with the Chinaman. ‘So if the son of a gun kills me,’ he told him, ‘the boys will know it for murder.’ He must have had a hunch, for he never came back.”
“Dead?” Bull broke a shocked silence.
The other nodded. “They acknowledge it—say he tried to kill Valles, which is, of course, all rot.”
Bull had leaped up. “Dead! And I did it! Drunken swine that I am! It’s no use.” He waved away expostulations. “You yourself warned me not to let him go alone!” He started out the door.