He paused, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
“No, sir,” he continued emphatically. “I know what becomes of the large percentage of your sudden converts. Most of ’em land up as hopeless booze artists in the last stages of D.T.—or else go completely bug-house. Lord knows, we get all kinds of ’em in that guardroom at the Post. Many’s the screechin’, prayin’ strait-jacketed nuisance I’ve had to escort up to Ponoka. After all’s said an’ done, the only philosophy a man can practise to make life worth living at all, is just to peg along quietly, doing the best he can under the circumstances in which he finds himself placed day by day. I know it is for a Mounted man, anyway for, begad! he get’s everybody else’s bloomin’ troubles dinned into his ears in addition to his own.
“As you said just now, we’ve both come through a sad passage. We have. But this feeling won’t stay with us. We’ll be genuinely an’ sincerely sorry an’ repentant for the time being, but by degrees we’ll fall back into our old ways again. It may be smug, complacent reasoning, but it’s a fact. Now, isn’t that right, Charley?”
The elder man smiled wearily. “Guess you’re pretty near it,” he admitted. “Don’t know whether you’re able to put all your troubles behind you as effectively as you intimate. I know I can’t lots of mine. There’s some I can’t forget—even after all these years. They’re with me night and day. Remember me telling you ... that day when we were up at Cecil Rhodes’ tomb, ’way back there up in the Matoppos?”
He gazed at Benton anxiously, almost timidly. Ellis bowed his head in assent, but he could not find words to answer just then. For there was something in the haggard, deeply lined face of his old friend that forbade conventional condolence.
A long silence ensued, and presently Musgrave rose to go.
“The Devil was sick—
The Devil a monk would be;”
he quoted, with a wry, whimsical smile. “I guess I’ll go on over to the hotel and see ‘Wilks,’ as you call him. He was much better this morning. Believe he’ll pull through without an operation now. Churchill should be able to take him down in three or four days’ time if he keeps improving like this. By the way! Churchill’s making a pretty long stay at the Post, isn’t he?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” yawned the Sergeant. “P’r’aps he’s not through with that case of his yet. It was right at the end of the docket. Maybe he’s got mighty good reason for not hurrying back, too,” he added ominously.
“I never noticed till the other day he’d got the South African ribbon up—whatever outfit was he in?” inquired the doctor.