Spurrier stepped forward.
“It’s time for you to stop,” he cautioned sharply. “I give you the fairest warning!”
But Comyn, riding the flood tide of his passion—a passion of distempered nerves—was beyond the reach of warnings and his words came in a bitter outpouring:
“I dare say it was only luck that let you bankrupt young Tillsdale, but it was as fatal to him as if it bore an uglier name.”
The sound in Spurrier’s throat was incoherent and his bodily impulse swift beyond interference. His flat palm smote Captain Comyn’s cheek, to come away leaving a red welt behind it, and as the others swept forward to intervene the two men grappled.
They were torn apart, still struggling, as Major Withers, unaccustomed to the brooking of such mutinies, interposed between them the bulk of his body and the moral force of his indignantly blazing eyes.
“I will have no more of this,” he thundered. “I am not a prize-fight referee, that I must break my officers out of clinches! Go to your quarters, Comyn! You, too, Spurrier. You are under arrest. I shall prefer charges against you both. I mean to make an example of this matter.”
But with a strange abruptness the fury died out of Comyn’s face. It left his passion-distorted features so instantly that the effect of transformation was uncanny. In a breathing space he seemed older and his eyes held the dark dejection of utter misery. His anger had flared and died before that grimmer emotion which secretly haunted him—the fear that he was going the way of climate-crazed Private Grant.
When they released him he turned dispiritedly and left the room in docile silence. He was not thinking of the charges to be preferred. They belonged to to-morrow. To-night was nearer, and to-night he must face those hours of sleeplessness that he dreaded more than all the penalties enunciated by the Articles of War.