Benton raised his troubled eyes and, for the first time that day, looked the other squarely in the face, with a certain sense of relief as he did so.
“Yes,” he answered listlessly. “I know I have. Charley,” he continued, “I don’t know exactly why it is, but that girl’s death’s shaken me up rather bad ... kid was an utter stranger to me, but somehow—somehow—it seems as if I’d known her always. Must have been her eyes.” His voice shook a little, and trailed off into a murmur. “Yes ... they were very like poor Eileen Regan’s—way back there in Jo’burg—very like hers, weren’t they?”
He paused, and the doctor nodded sympathetically. Before the war he had known the Sergeant’s dead love well—had attended her in her last illness. There was a long silence.
“Don’t worry, Ellis,” said Musgrave softly. “She’s in a better place now, I think, for she was more sinned against than sinning, poor girl.”
Benton got up and, leaning out of the open window, looked dreamily away over the sun-scorched prairie.
“Aye,” he muttered slowly, half to himself; “I don’t think—I know. I saw the look on her face the night she died ... an’ I saw her again—afterwards. That should stop me from worrying. See here; look, Charley,” he went on, in a steadier voice, turning to his companion: “You must have seen many deaths in your time—lots more than I have, I guess ... an’ God knows I’ve seen enough, one way an’ another. I tell you—people in their last stages see something that we can’t. It’s beyond our ken—but it’s there. Probably you as a doctor, with all your scientific medical theories, analyze it differently, but you know what I mean, for all that.”
Musgrave did not answer at once, but smoked thoughtfully on for a space.
“Yes,” he agreed, with a curious, dry intonation in his voice, “I know what you mean, all right. No doubt they do possess some strange prescience ... but I don’t think we’ll start a discussion on that, old man. Circumstances have reduced both of us to a certain frame of mind just now, wherein we might be persuaded into believing anything.”
Ellis cogitated awhile over this last utterance.
“M’m—yes,” he admitted reluctantly. “Only temporarily at that, too. Begad!... I’m the one that knows it.... Guess I’m the most impulsive, changeable beggar that ever was.... Always have been more or less of an impressionable fool—where women are concerned, anyway. S’pose it’s my nature. Here are we two—we’ve both had our troubles at various periods of our sinful lives. Some were of our own making—some were not. Mind! I’m not meanin’ this lightly, remember ... far from it at such a time as this ... but just the plain, absolute facts—coming from a man who knows himself too well to trust his passing emotions.” He struck a match and lit his pipe again, continuing with some irritation in his voice. “All that bunkum that religious extremists and temperance cranks would have you believe ... about sudden conversions an’ all that.... Fellows can alter their ways a bit—chuck a brace, an’ climb out of the pit they’ve dug for themselves, no doubt. But it’s a gradual process, an’ doesn’t come quick by any means, like these fanatics try to make out. There’s one of ’em, in particular, who makes a specialty of writing—what he, in his limited knowledge of actual facts—conceives to be true Western yarns. Most of ’em, I guess, pass as such with the general public who read ’em. Oh, he’s great on this conversion business. One was a fool book about our Force, I remember, where he makes the bucks go pallin’ around arm in arm with their superior officers—doin’ the ‘Percy, old chap,’ stunt, ‘When we were at college together, you know!’ Sounds all hunkadory—like a happy family, an’ all that but, unfortunately, it ain’t true. Can’t imagine it happening with any of the powers that be in our Division, anyway. Take ‘Father,’ for instance—what? Then, again—all that stuff—what ‘Tork abaht Tompkins’ our regimental teamster calls ‘’Igh falutin’ Bull-Durham,’ and ‘Father’—‘Poppycock’ that’s written about the Force. An’ oh—always in a bloomin’ red serge, of course, no matter what dirty job they’re on ... never a stable-jacket—they don’t wear such things. All the pictures you see of Mounted Policemen, too, chasin’ cattle rustlers, arresting bootleggers, an’ nitchies, in which we’re depicted as such ’eroes’—red serge, again—so’s the noble Mounted cop can be seen comin’ a long ways off. That reminds me, though—I’ll have to ride back to the Creek in one myself,” he added ruefully. “My stable-jacket’s ruined with all that blood on it.”