“A fool there was, and he made his prayer—”
he quoted, with a low, bitter laugh. “And by gum! it’s me that knows it.”
The doctor silently eyed him in cynical abstraction awhile after this outburst, then his grim mouth relaxed into a faint sympathetic grin, and he held out his hand.
“Aye!... ‘Even as you and I,’” he finished softly. “Shake!... Is that why you chucked up your commission in India?... I and Ben always thought so,” he continued, as the Provost nodded wearily to his query. “None of our business to get making inquisitions, though.... Well! this sad news has been quite a shock to our nervous systems. Kind of breaks up us ‘Three Musketeers,’ eh?... Looks very much as if we’re going to lose our D’Artagnan. The old chum of your bachelor days is, somehow, never the same again to you after he gets married. S’pose an all-wise Providence has ordained things so for some unfathomable reason. Think we need a little drink to console us.”
And he got up with a dreary sighing yawn and, unlocking a small mahogany liquor cellaret, produced a splendid silver and cut-glass “Tantalus.”
“What’s yours, Hop?” he inquired. “Brandy, or ‘Scotch’?”
Leaving these two well-meaning, if cynical, worthies to console each other with the bitter philosophy which retrospection of past irremedial misfortunes has caused many better, and worse, men than them to revert to, let us return to the detachment at Cherry Creek, where at this particular moment the object of their commiseration is leaning back in his favorite chair, with his head resting in its customary position against the leopard-skin kaross. Tired out by a long and uneventful four days’ patrol, Ellis lit a pipe and gazed wearily out through the open door into the gathering dusk. Gradually, his mind, still obsessed with the vague memories of brands of missing cattle and horses and the usual round of more or less petty complaints, strayed back to the Trainors’ establishment.
He found himself wondering how Mary was, and what had caused her to be so strangely silent and abstracted during that last homeward ride together from Lone Butte. At supper time, too, he mused, she had been in the same mood ... had hardly spoken to him at all? Could it be that—?
And, not unmixed with an unfamiliar, slightly self-conscious, feeling of shame, came the sudden thought that she might have grown to regard his attentions in a more serious light than mere frank camaraderie. And, if that was so—well—she sure must be thinking him a proper “laggard in love.” Not much of the “Young Lochinvar” about him, he reflected bitterly. Anyway, it certainly didn’t seem very gentlemanly behavior on his part, or the right thing, exactly, to run around after a girl—like he undoubtedly had, to a certain extent—with Mary, and then keep her “hanging on the fence” indefinitely, as it were, like that. Surely the Trainors must be wondering not a little, too. How the deuce was it that he had never thought of his conduct in that light before? What a simple fool he had been not to have “tumbled” to all this earlier? Should he chance it? She could but “turn him down” like she had the rest—some of whose very palpable discomfiture he had been a casual and not altogether disinterested witness on more than one occasion.
And then, on the other hand, was he justified in asking any woman to share the lot that he had so often bitterly inveighed against as being utterly insufficient, unsuitable, and contrary to all his ideals of conjugal happiness?