The boy was still full of the horror of the day before. Mercer’s brother was in Cambridge, he said—arrived that morning from New York. “Endy is going to fetch him round to get him out of the reporters’ way sometime this evening; maybe there’s something I can do”—this in explanation of his declining to dine with the colonel. As the two entered the rooms, Winter was a little in advance, and caught the first glimpse of a man sitting in a big mission arm-chair, his head sunk on his breast. So absorbed was this man in his own distempered musings that the new-comers’ approach did not arouse him. He sat with knitted brows and clenched hands, staring into vacancy; his rigid and pallid features set in a ghastly intensity of thought. There was suffering in the look; but there was more: the colonel, who had been living among the serpent passions of the Orient, knew deadly anger when he saw it; it was branded on the face before him. Involuntarily he fell back; he felt as if he had blundered in on a naked soul. Noiselessly he slipped out of the range of vision. He spoke loudly, halting to ask some question about the rooms; this made a moment’s pause.
It was sufficient; in the study they found a quiet, calm, although rather haggard-looking man, who greeted Winter’s companion courteously, with a Southern accent, and a very good manner. He was presented to the colonel as Mr. Mercer. He would have excused himself, professing that he was just going, but the colonel took the words out of his mouth: “Ralph, here, has a cigar for me—that is all I came for; see you at the Touraine, Ralph, to-morrow for luncheon, then.” He did not see the man again; neither did he see Ralph, although he made good, so far as in him lay, his fiction of an engagement at the Touraine. But Ralph could not come; and Winter had lunched, instead, with an old friend at his club, and had watched, through a stately Georgian window, the shifting greenery of the Common in an east wind.
All through the luncheon the soldier’s mind kept swerving from the talk in hand to Cary Mercer’s face. Yet he never expected to see it again. Three years later he did see it; and this second encounter, of which, by the way, Mercer was unconscious, was the beginning of an absorbing chapter in his life. A short space of time that chapter occupied; yet into it crowded mystery, peril, a wonderful and awful spectacle, the keenest happiness and the cruelest anxiety. Let his days be ever so many, the series of events which followed Mercer’s reappearance will not be blurred by succeeding experiences; their vivid and haunting pictures will burn through commoner and later happenings as an electric torch flares through layers of mist.
Nothing, however, could promise adventure less than the dull and chilly late March evening when the chapter began. Nor could any one be less on the lookout for adventure, or even interest, than was Rupert Winter. In truth, he was listless and depressed.
When he alighted from his cab in the great court of the Rock Island Station he found Haley, his old orderly, with a hand on the door-hasp. Haley’s military stoicism of demeanor could not quite conceal a certain agitation—at least not from the colonel’s shrewd eye, used to catch the moods of his soldiers. He strangled a kind of sigh. “Doesn’t like it much more than I,” thought Rupert Winter. “This is mighty kind of you, Haley,” he said.
“Yes, sor,” answered Haley, saluting. The colonel grinned feebly. Haley, busy repelling a youthful porter, did not notice the grin; he strode ahead with the colonel’s world-scarred hand-luggage, found an empty settee beside one of the square-tiled columns of the waiting-room and disposed his burden on the iron-railed seat next the corner one, which he reserved for the colonel.
“The train ain’t in yet, Colonel,” said he. “I’ll be telling you—”
“No, Haley,” interrupted the colonel, whose lip twitched a little; and he looked aside; “best say good-by now; don’t wait. The fact is, I’m thinking of too many things you and I have gone through together.” He held out his hand; Haley, with a stony expression, gazed past it and saluted, while he repeated: “Yes, sor; I’ll be back to take the bags whin the train’s made up.” Whereupon he wheeled and made off with speed.
“Just the same damned obstinate way he’s always had,” chuckled the colonel to himself. Nevertheless, something ached in his throat as he frowned and winked.
“Oh, get a brace on you, you played-out old sport!” he muttered. “The game’s on the last four cards and you haven’t established your suit; you’ll have to sit back and watch the other fellows play!” But his dreary thoughts persisted. Rupert was a colonel in the regular army of the United States. He had been brevetted a brigadier-general after the Spanish War, and had commanded, not only a brigade, but a division at one critical time in the Philippines; but for reasons probably known to the little knot of politicians who “hung it up,” although incomprehensible to most Americans, Congress had failed to pass the bill giving the wearers of brevet titles the right to keep their hard-won and empty honors; wherefore General Winter had declined to Colonel Winter.