"Well, sir, compare him with old Sorrel Top, or Paddy, or the great Sam himself, or dear old Wormy, or young Perry, or dammit, even Paper Collar Johnny."
"Canadians all. Mr. Sarde is Canadian, too."
"The others are gentlemen. A cad with a commission is an outrage. He means well, but he doesn't set me a good example, sir; he's bad for my morals; he makes me peevish. What have I done that this bounder should come to reign over me?"
The dear man held up his thermometer as a threat.
"When the patient," he chuckled, "gets full of repartee, poor charity takes wings. I'm off to torture a wounded volunteer, and after me comes the parson. Beware of doctors, Blackguard." He gave me my pet name!
Next day the wounded were moved to Miss Baker's house—to be haunted by an angel. I used to nip out of bed and help her while she threatened to turn me into the horse corral. To that house came Mrs. Sarde secretly, with a pudding. I like chocolate shapes. She threatened widowhood and overdressed the part. She told me in stage whispers how she had crawled and crouched behind the corner of the stockade at Carlton, with creepy gestures in the shuddering gloom, to hear me reading the gospel to poor Sarde. She made me tell her all I had heard, and more, about Happy Bill, the converted railroad stoker, how he wasn't exactly a parson, and his monkey business not precisely a marriage. Oh, she was great as the outraged wife, betrayed but calm, trapped in a bogus marriage, but chock-full of respectability, a helpless prey. Fact is, the woman was having the time of her life, reeking adventure like a born adventuress. She clawed the air, she capsized my pudding, she spouted melodrama drivel about her marriage lines and bloody doom. This way lies madness! Gimme the dagger! She had a fat part to play in real melodrama, pleased all to pieces, having paroxysms of rage and grief, with one eye cocked at my shaving glass. Then she was washed away in floods of tears, while I taught her how to do coyote howls, until at last she looked up with a grin as if to say, "How's that, umpire?"
Only he is fortunate with women of whom they take no notice. I was not fortunate. They always noticed me, to my undoing. Of course, they made me pay, at every gate, their toll of kisses on the hell road. Here was the puss complete who, when I called her a shammy little liar, avowed me to be the only man who really understood. Because I denied her I was the only man she ever wanted. She knew that I liked pussies, that no puss could be too fluffy—and let me see her at her fluffiest. She wanted to get rid of Sarde that she might marry me. I told her kittens were all very well to play with, but not much use to keep, because they always degenerated into cats. My ears should select my woman, not my eyes.
Oh, she was very fair, and most alluring, catching at my senses, tearing at my heart—a foul temptation to my body. And I was twenty-one years young in those days. I took her by the shoulders from behind, kissed her upon the neck—a much less tempting place than the lips I craved for—and bundled her out of the house to sulk in the horse corral while I devoured her pudding.
It was after the war was over, some time about September, that the Sardes were transferred again to Fort Qu'Appelle. And there the woman went stalking for Happy Bill. She thought herself no end of a scout when she found him. Then she paid five dollars to be told by a real live lawyer in his legal jargon that she was not a married lady. Her next act was to write a declaration of her woes and "pin it to Sarde's bosom with a dagger"—which means, I suppose, that she left a letter for him on the dressing-table before she robbed his cash-box, and streaked off home to uncle. She used to write me most inviting letters.