“Come on!” insisted Barry. “Hobbs will have a fire going, and hot coffee in ten minutes. Come on, old chap. I want you to.”
He threw his arm around Cameron's shoulder and dragged him in. The boy dropped onto Barry's cot, and, as he was, boots and coat on, was asleep before the coffee was ready. His boyish face, with its haggard look, struck pity to Barry's heart, and recalled his father's words, “These boys need their mothers.” If ever a lad needed his mother, it was young Cameron, and just in that hour.
He woke the boy up, gave him his coffee, had Hobbs remove his boots, made him undress and covered him up in his blankets. Then, taking his own coffee, he lay down on Hobbs' bed.
“Harry,” he said, “give us every minute of sleep you can. Wake us just one-half hour before reveille with coffee and everything else good you can rustle, and, Harry, waken me before Mr. Cameron.”
When he lay down to sleep he made an amazing discovery—that his own horror and fear and self-distrust had entirely passed away. He felt himself quite prepared to “carry on.” How had this thing come to pass? His physical recuperation by means of coffee and food? This doubtless in part, but only in part. In his concern for his friend he had forgotten himself, and in forgetting himself he had forgotten his fear. It was an amazing discovery.
“Thank the good God,” he said. “He never forgets a fellow, and I won't forget that.”
He woke to find Hobbs at his side, with coffee, toast and bacon, and on the floor beside his cot his tub awaiting him—the tub being a rubber receptacle exactly eighteen inches in diameter.
He hurried through his dressing, and his breakfast, all the while Cameron lying like a dead man, and with almost a dead man's face.
Barry hated to waken him, but reveille was but a bare thirty minutes off, and he had an experiment to work upon his friend.
“Bring the coffee, Harry. Not the bacon, yet,” he ordered.