What earthly need have you for money?”
“It’s there, bless its golden heart,” said Dick. “It’s there all the time.
Providence has sent me nuts while I have teeth to crack ’em with. I haven’t yet found the nut I wish to crack, but I’m keeping my teeth filed.
Perhaps some day you and I will go for a walk round the wide earth.”
“With no work to do, nobody to worry us, and nobody to compete with? You would be unfit to speak to in a week. Besides, I shouldn’t go. I don’t care to profit by the price of a man’s soul,—for that’s what it would mean.
Dick, it’s no use arguing. You’re a fool.”
“Don’t see it. When I was on that Chinese pig-boat, our captain got credit for saving about twenty-five thousand very seasick little pigs, when our old tramp of a steamer fell foul of a timber-junk. Now, taking those pigs as a parallel——”
“Oh, confound your parallels! Whenever I try to improve your soul, you always drag in some anecdote from your very shady past. Pigs aren’t the British public; and self-respect is self-respect the world over. Go out for a walk and try to catch some self-respect. And, I say, if the Nilghai comes up this evening can I show him your diggings?”
“Surely. You’ll be asking whether you must knock at my door, next.” And Dick departed, to take counsel with himself in the rapidly gathering London fog.
Half an hour after he had left, the Nilghai laboured up the staircase. He was the chiefest, as he was the youngest, of the war correspondents, and his experiences dated from the birth of the needle-gun. Saving only his ally, Keneu the Great War Eagle, there was no man higher in the craft than he, and he always opened his conversation with the news that there would be trouble in the Balkans in the spring. Torpenhow laughed as he entered.