But the lieutenant who had escaped financial disaster and won a miniature fortune had gone on talking to the girl.
Might it not be suspected in these circumstances that “Plunger” Spurrier’s refusal to treat his accusation seriously was only an attitude? He was sitting 14 in a game now with his neck at stake and the cards running against him. Perhaps he was only bluffing as he had never bluffed before. Possibly he was brazening it out.
It was not until the battalion had hiked back through bosque and over mountains to Manila that the lieutenant faced his tribunal: a court whose simplified methods cut away the maze of technicalities at which a man may grasp before a civilian jury of his peers.
If, when he actually sat in the room where the evidence was heard, his assurance that he was to emerge clean-shriven began to reel under blows more powerful than he had expected, at least his face continued to testify for him with an outward serenity of confidence.
Doctor James told his story with an admirable restraint and an absolute absence of coloring. He had meant to go to Comyn, because he read in his eyes the signs of nerve waste and insomnia; the same things that had caused too many suicides among the men whose nervous constitutions failed to adapt themselves to the climate.
Before he had carried his purpose to fulfillment—perhaps a half hour before—he had gone to look in on the case of Private Grant, who was suffering from just such a malady, though in a more serious degree. That private, a mountaineer from the Cumberland hills of Kentucky, had been to all appearances merely a lunatic, although it was a case which would yield to treatment or perhaps come to recovery even if left to itself. On this night he had gone to see if Grant needed an opiate, but had found the patient apparently sleeping without restlessness, and had not roused him. At the door of the place where Grant was under 15 guard, he had paused for a word with Private Severance who stood there on sentry duty.
It had been a sticky night following a hot day, and in the calle upon which lay the command in billets of nipa-thatched houses, no one but himself and the sentries were astir during the twenty minutes he had spent strolling in the moonlight. On rounding a corner he had seen a light in Comyn’s window, and he had gone around the angle of the adobe house, since the door was on the farther side, to offer the captain a sleeping potion, too. That was how he chanced on the scene of the tragedy, just a moment too late for service.
“You say,” began Spurrier’s counsel, on cross-examination, “that you visited Private Grant about half an hour before Captain Comyn was killed and found him apparently resting naturally, although on previous nights you had thought morphia necessary to quiet his delirium?”
The major nodded, then qualified slowly:
“Grant had not, of course, been continuously out of his head nor had he always slept brokenly. There had been lucid periods alternating with exhausting storm.”