“Well, I am looking at you,” said the major, allowing his gaze to travel slowly up and down the shrinking figure before him. “You certainly look terribly seedy, and not much like the Captain Kerwick under whom I used to serve. But if that’s any reason for your refusing to sit down to half-a-dozen Blue-Points with me, why, I simply fail to see it.”
“I’ll not do it,” said the other doggedly. “No, Pollard, I’ll not do it. I’m out of your world, and you’re out of mine. That’s the long and short of it. Possibly you noticed that I didn’t say I was glad to see you? Well, I’m not. I’m confoundedly sorry I set eyes on you; or, rather, that you set eyes on me. Will you let me go now? Good night.”
Without a word in reply to this outbreak, Pollard slipped an arm under that of his friend, and used the other to aid his voice in attracting the attention of a passing cab. When the vehicle pulled up beside the curbing, he wrenched open the door, good-naturedly pushed in his prisoner, and followed, after having given to the driver the address of his cosey bachelor rooms in an up-town hotel.
“My dear man,” said he, drawing up the heavy robe and carefully tucking it around his thinly clad companion, “it’s useless for you to protest. There’s been a change since you were lord high autocrat of ‘M’ Company. I’ve climbed up from lieutenant to captain, and then from captain to major; so you can see the utter folly of trying to dispute my commands. You’ll have to submit, Kerwick, and you’ll do well to submit gracefully.”
“And now,” said Pollard, twenty minutes later, after he had settled his captive in a big arm-chair before the glowing coal fire in his rooms, “now we’ll consider the question of supper, first. Other matters may wait their turn. You may bring up,” to the neatly uniformed colored boy who had appeared in answer to his vigorous assault upon the electric bell, “two half-dozens of oysters on the shell, and a small tenderloin steak, fairly well-done, and a bottle of—” He gave a side glance at the man seated before his fire. “And a pot of coffee,” he amended.
“That last was well thought of,” said Kerwick, as the bell boy left the room. “You’re still observant, I see. Well, you’ve guessed it; the bottle has held altogether too prominent a place in my recent history.”
The ruins of the supper had been cleared away. Kerwick was again installed before the fire, with a cigar. Pollard lighted his old black briar, pulled a chair towards the hearth, and said, as he seated himself, “We’re not to have a green Yuletide, this year, after all. It’s snowing in earnest now.”
“H’m! tomorrow’s Christmas,” murmured Kerwick, with something like a sigh. “So it is. I hadn’t thought much about it. Well, Pollard, you haven’t asked me yet—but I suppose you’re waiting for me to give an account of myself.”
The major nodded, and smoked on in silence while his friend told the story of the past few years: How he had broken away from all his early associations in order to grasp at what had seemed a chance for making rapid fortune in the West; how reverses had come quickly, one upon another, until—baffled and beaten at every point—he had yielded under the repeated blows, and finally had staggered and gone down beneath the weight of discouragement.
“And here I am, back again,” Kerwick wound up, flinging into the fire his half finished cigar, as if its flavor brought to him some of the bitterness of recent disappointment; “here I am, at forty-five, in what should be the prime of my life—homeless, hopeless, penniless, and out of the game.”