These men had been forced into a companionship of monotony in a climate of unhealth until their studied politeness, even their forced jocularity was rather the effort of toleration than the easy play of comradeship. Their arduously wooed excitement of draw-poker, which had run improvidently out of bounds, was not a pleasure so much as an expedient against the boredom that had rubbed their tempers threadbare and put an edgy sharpness on their nerves.
Captain Comyn, upon whose call for cards the dealer now waited, was thinking of Private Grant out there under guard in the improvised hospital. The islands had “gotten to” Private Grant and “locoed” him, and he had breathed sulphurous maledictions against Captain Comyn’s life—but it was not those threats that now disturbed the company commander.
Of late Captain Comyn had been lying awake at night and wondering if he, too, were not going the same way as the unfortunate file. Horribly quiet fears had been stealing poisonously into his mind—a mind not given to timidities—and the word “melancholia” had assumed for him a morbid and irresistible compulsion. No one save the captain’s self knew of these 3 secret hauntings, born of climate and smoldering fever, and he would not have revealed them on the torture rack. For them he entertained the same shame as that of a boy grown too large for such weakness, who shudders with an unconfessed fear of the dark. But he could no more shake them loose and be free of them than could the Ancient Mariner rid himself of the bird of ill-omen tied about his neck. Now he pulled himself together and tossed away a single card.
“I’ll take one in the place of that,” he commented with studied carelessness, and Lieutenant John Spurrier, with that infectious smile which came readily to his lips, pointed a contrast with the captain’s abstraction by the snappy quickness of his announcement:
“If I’m going to trail along, I’ll need three. Yes, three, please, major.”
“When Spurrier sits in the game,” commented a player who, with a dolorous glance at the booty before him, threw down his hands, “we at least get action. Myself, I’m out of it.”
The battalion commander studied the ceiling with a troubled furrow between his brows which was not brought there by the hazards of luck. He was reflecting that whenever a game was organized it was Spurrier who quickened its tempo from innocuous amusement to reckless extravagance. Spurrier, fitted for his life with so many soldierly qualities, was still, above all else, a plunger. That spirit seemed a passion that filled and overflowed him. Temperate in other habits, he played like a nabob. The major remembered hearing that even at West Point Jack Spurrier had narrowly, escaped dismissal for gambling in 4 quarters, though his class standing had been distinguished and his gridiron record had become a tradition.
This sort of game with “the roof off and deuces wild,” was not good for the morale of his junior officers, mused the major. It was like spiking whisky with absinthe. Yes, to-morrow he would have Spurrier at his quarters and talk to him like a Dutch uncle.
There were three left battling for the often sweetened pot now, with three more who had dropped out, looking on, and a tensity enveloped the long-drawn climax of the evening’s session.
Captain Comyn’s cheek bones had reddened and his irascible frown lines deepened. For the moment his fears of melancholia had been swallowed up in a fitful fury against Spurrier and his smiling face.