“Interestin’?” The man eyed him warily. “Yes, I guess it was interestin’ all right.”
Hillard: “And you must have found it specially so knowing the country and the people.”
They had reached the pavement, and the man swung round almost threateningly. “Who says I know the country?”
“Well, I thought it likely, as you said you knew the language.”
“Ah, so I did, mister, so I did. . . And you was interested?”
“Why, yes. I think anyone would be. To see the school, the little thatched church, the neat fields, all grown up in a couple of years, and all the work of two white men. . . They’re brave fellows out there; good men.”
They had turned into the Park, pleasant with a sense of cool grass and damp borders. The man in khaki paused and sniffed luxuriously; the wariness had gone out of his face. “Yes,” he said, gravely, “they’re good men. That man Raynor, now, he’s a mix of holiness and horse-sense which you’d call uncommon. Yes, sir, uncommon. And all that good man has”—he turned suddenly and laid his hand on Hillard’s arm—“all that good man has, all he’s done, he owes to Brad Timmins, who weren’t good in any sense o’ the word. Queer, ain’t it?”
Hillard took him deftly by the elbow, turned him to a bench, and said, “Go on.”
It came something like this:
“We were days and days in the grass country, and that’s a thing very bad for the nerves. You see nothing but grass, close-packed, stem and blade. We travelled blind as if we was in a tunnel, and the roof of the tunnel was the achin’ sky. We’d brush through the grass as endless as water. And hot. . . Brad and I we quarreled all the way up, and, what made it worse, we had to quarrel amiable. In a friendly voice, I mean, so the niggers wouldn’t know. It’s that way. It was about a girl; and he’d curse me to kingdom come in a tea-and-ices sort of tone that made me sick, and I’d answer accordin’. He was a hard case, was Brad. But pretty soon he forgot about the girl, and thought of nothing but what we’d come for.