Yet he did not seem a miser; his willingness to help at anything in camp was unchanging, and a surer test of not being stingy was the indifference he showed to losing or winning the little sums we played at cards for after supper and before bed. The score I kept in my diary showed him to belong to the losing class. His help in camp was real, not merely well meant; the curious haze or blur in which his mind had seemed to be at the corral cleared away, and he was worth his wages. What he had said he could do, he did, and more. And yet, when I looked at him, he was somehow forever pitiful.
“Do you think anything is the matter with him?” I asked Scipio.
“Only just one thing. He’d oughtn’t never to have been born.”
“That probably applies to several million people all over this planet.”
“Sure,” assented Scipio cheerfully. He was not one of these.
“He’s so eternally silent!” I said presently.
“A man don’t ask to be born,” pursued Scipio.
“Parents can’t stop to think of that,” I returned.
“H’m,” mused Scipio. “Somebody or something has taken good care they’ll never.”