CHAPTER II
The situation of John Spurrier, who was Jack Spurrier to every man in that command, standing under the monstrous presumption of having murdered a brother officer, called for a reaccommodation of the battalion’s whole habit of thought. It demanded a new and unwelcome word in their vocabulary of ideas, and against it argued, with the hot advocacy of tested acquaintance, every characteristic of the man himself, and every law of probability. For its acceptance spoke only one forceful plea—evidence which unpleasantly skirted the actuality of demonstration. Short of seeing Spurrier shoot his captain down and toss his pistol through the open window, Major James could hardly have witnessed a more damaging picture than the hurriedly opened door had framed to his vision.
Within the close-drawn cordon of a post, held to military accountability, facts were as traceable as entries on a card index—and these facts began building to the lieutenant’s undoing. They seemed to bring out like acid on sympathetic ink the miracle of a Mr. Hyde where his comrades had known only a Doctor Jekyll.
The one man out of the two skeleton companies of infantry stationed in the interior town who remained seemingly impervious to the strangulating force of the tightening net was Spurrier himself.
In another man that insulated and steady-eyed confidence might have served as a manifest of innocence and a proclamation of clean conscience. But Spurrier wore a nick-name, until now lightly considered, to which new conditions had added importance.
They had called him “The Plunger,” and now they could not forget the nickeled and chrome-hardened gambling nerve which had won for him the sobriquet. There had been the coup at Oakland, for example, when a stretch finish had stood to ruin him or suddenly enrich him—an incident that had gone down in racing history and made café talk.
Through a smother of concealing dust and a thunder of hoofs, the field had struggled into the stretch that afternoon, tight-bunched, with its snapping silks too closely tangled for easy distinguishing—but the cerise cap that proclaimed Spurrier’s choice was nowhere in sight. The bookmakers pedestalled on their high stools with field glasses glued to their eyes had been more excited than the young officer on the club-house lawn, who put away his binoculars while the horses were still in the back stretch and turned to chat with a girl.
Three lengths from the finish a pair of distended nostrils had thrust themselves ahead of the other muzzles to catch the judges’ eyes, and bending over steaming withers had nodded a cerise cap.