“You go through life on a zigzag,” I protested, “aiming for some goal that another would cut straight across for, making deviations of an hour to save you a second’s unpleasantness. I wish I could show you the diplomacy of straightforwardness: the honest word, though hard to say sometimes, is a man’s duty as much as the honest deed of hand.”
“Am I not as honest of my word as any in a matter of honour? I but gloze sometimes for the sake of the affection I have for all God’s creatures.”
I was losing patience of his attitude and speaking perhaps with bitterness, for here were his foolish ideas of punctilio bringing us a mile or two off our road and into a part of the country where we were more certain of being observed by enemies than in the way behind us.
“You jink from ambuscade to ambuscade of phrase like a fox,” I cried.
“Call it like a good soldier, and I’ll never quarrel with your compliment,” he said, good-humouredly. “I had the second excuse for the woman in my mind before the first one missed fire.”
“Worse and worse!”
“Not a bit of it: it is but applying a rule of fortification to a peaceful palaver. Have bastion and ravelin as sure as may be, but safer still the sally-port of retreat.”
I stood on the road and looked at him, smiling very smug and self-complacent before me, and though I loved the man I felt bound to prick a hole in his conceit.
But at that moment a dead branch snapped in a little plantation that lay by the way, and we turned quickly to see come to us a tall lean man in MacDonald clothing.