They told Charlie, whom they found bending, red-eyed, over a steaming kettle. And the cook, with a straightforward sort of moral courage, went at once to announce his failure at guarding the camp. As luck would have it, he found the brothers Vandervelt together, at the wash basin behind their tent.
“May I speak to you, sir?” addressing the younger.
“Certainly, Charlie—What luck?” was the reply. And then, for a moment, they waited,—Young Van half glancing at his brother, Charlie summoning every ounce of this wonderful new sense of responsibility for the ordeal which he saw was to come, Old Van meaning unmistakably to take a hand in the discussion.
“We lost six mules last night, Mr. Vandervelt,” said Charlie, at length, plainly addressing Young Van.
“We lost six mules, did we?” mimicked the veteran, breaking in before his brother could reply. “What do you mean by coming here with such a story, you—?” The tirade was on. Old Van applied to the cook such epithets as men did not employ at that time to any great extent on the plains. All the depression of the day before, which he had not succeeded in sleeping off, came out in a series of red-hot phrases, which, to Young Van’s, and to his own still greater surprise, Charlie took. Young Van, looking every second for a blow or even for a shot, could not see that he so much as twitched a muscle. Finally Old Van paused, not because he was in any danger of running out of epithets, but because something in the attitude of both Charlie and his brother tended to clarify the situation in his mind. Gus was standing almost as squarely as Charlie, and there were signs of tension about his mouth. It was no time for the engineers to develop a conflict of authority.
When his brother had stopped talking, Young Van said shortly, “How did you come to let them get away, Charlie?”
“I fell asleep, Mr. Vandervelt,—it must have been after three this morning, and I didn’t wake up until four.”
“But what was the matter with your men?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out, sir. They must have been asleep, too.”
“Who was on guard at that point?”