“I guess he knows it’s all right now,” I said, thinking at once that Lisa had explained to her husband and that now he was trying to make up with the pup. “You wait here for me, Ben,” I told him, as I went around the corner with Leon.
Lisa welcomed us happily and exclaimed, “I have just tell him and he do not beleeve it!” Then she turned and called, “Pierre! Venez ici!”
The old man came, saw, and was convinced. “Which is ze jeune fille?” he asked, grinning cheerfully.
He looked me over for a moment and muttered, “Trés bien ... trés bien ... I t’ought you make cooked-up lie before zis.” He admitted that he believed us now, but still he did not seem to be entirely happy over the discovery of his error. He left us with Lisa and I heard him moving around, first in the barroom and then outdoors, as if he were looking for something.
We had been there perhaps ten minutes when Ben appeared in the door, asking stupidly if we had seen the pup. “He ain’t outside,” he declared, as if that were news. “He ain’t outside.”
I whistled and called and finally Esky appeared from within, lapping his jaws from the feast he had just had. Old Pierre tried to get him to come to him, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with him, just got behind Ben’s legs and looked at Pierre sort of queerly, so much as to say, “I’ll eat your meat, but I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”
Ben took him out. A moment later we bade good-by to the Lenotiers and joined Ben at the corner. As it was early yet, I suggested that we take a walk to the park and give Ben a chance to get some air. So we walked away and found a bench, whereon Ben flopped down and promptly began to doze off, with the result that Leon and I had an opportunity to talk about ourselves to a certain extent.
I gathered a lot from what Leon told me and now I could better understand the change that had come over him: for he certainly was a different man altogether. It seems that the mood in which he went to Booneville passed away as soon as his arm began to heal, and he had nothing to do but think about how rotten he was. The solitude—of whose virtues and beauties he had sung so often—closed about him depressingly and even the sounds of his own voice came back at him with echoes and reëchoes from the hills. He had never been sociable nor friendly, and the natives of Booneville cast suspicious glances at him upon the infrequent occasions of his visits to the post office. He discovered that the torments of loneliness, of strange-noised nights and uneventful days, were far worse than any of the fancied or real horrors of war. I guess he made up his mind then that the army was a better place for him than Booneville, and I don’t think he cared a great deal whether he succeeded in getting across to rescue me: his idea was simply to go out and do something that would revive his self-respect and prove to himself that he was no weakling or coward.
It may be that he feared my being detected, in which case he would have been found and sent up for desertion, no doubt. He may have figured that he was safer in the army than he would be out of it—should anything happen to me. And after he was in again, he found it was just as easy to make the best of army life as it was to make the worst of it. He was thrown into a company that showed in its personnel an exceptional cross section of American citizenry, and he stuck out his chin, determined to take what was given him, made no effort to shirk his duties, however unpleasant they happened to be. He discovered that the noncoms thought him a clever and promising man, and his comrades called him a good fellow. It must have seemed awfully easy to him now that he didn’t fight against it.
He served his soldier’s apprenticeship over again, with all the unpleasantness of kitchen police, garbage detail, latrine duty, grounds police; took the unpolite commands of the drill and training field with actual zest; learned to wash his clothes and sew on buttons and do any number of other things which he once thought were utterly, unspeakably, impossible for a person of his æsthetic plane. And he filled out in the chest, so that he looked as big across the front as I did.