"Come aboard!" came the clear, boyish voice of its occupant, in response to a knuckle-tattoo on the panel, and the visitors, Slavin and Yorke, entered.
Redmond, sitting up in bed, comfortably propped with pillows, threw aside the magazine he had been reading and greeted the new-comers jovially and with a light in his eyes which did the hearts of those worthies good to see.
A month's careful nursing and absolute quiet had transformed their wounded comrade into a somewhat different being from the delirious patient they had beheld when last they stood in that room. Allowing for a slight emaciation and the inevitable hospital pallor, he appeared to be well on the road to convalescence.
"Sit at ease!" he said, with a fair semblance of his old grin. "Smoke up if you want to, they don't kick about it here. I've tried it but it tastes rotten as yet. Well! What's doin' in L?" (He referred to the Division.)
"Hell, yu' mane," corrected Slavin grimly, as he and Yorke proceeded to divest themselves of their side-arms and unbutton their tunics. "Not much doin' now, but—later, p'raps. . . ."
"Just got back from Supreme Court," explained Yorke. "Gully! . . . He's to be 'bumped off' this day-month. . . ."
There came a long, tense silence.
"G—-d!" broke out Yorke suddenly, arousing Redmond out of the deep
reverie into which he had sunk on receipt of the news—"the look on that
Eugene Aram face of his when the jury filed in and threw the book at him!
I can't forget it somehow."
"Well! yeh want tu thin!" remarked Slavin bluntly. "Quit ut! . . . d'ju hear? . . . 'Tis no sort av talk, that, for a sick room. . . ."
And hereafter they all avoided the sinister subject.