A couple of months passed quietly. Hemming worked at a series of short stories, and learned the gaudy-coloured, easy-going city by heart. He received several letters from Hicks, and heard that the diamond had been sold at a good price. O'Rourke pulled on his riding-boots again, and exercised McPhey's stable, night and morning.
Hemming's white stallion was once more an inmate of this stable. Smith recovered his strength slowly, and spent his days in easeful meditations and unnamed regrets for the good time of fighting and comradeship.
One day, Captain Santosa (who, through the influence of McPhey and the major, had procured a commission in the cavalry regiment stationed in Pernambuco) brought news of Penthouse's death to Hemming. Penthouse had been found in a dying condition in the hut of a poor woman, on the trail above Pernamba, by a party of government troops. He had been shot during the attack upon the President's villa, and, crawling away from the fight, had been found by the peasant woman, and tended by her through his weeks of suffering. She had explained to the officer in command that an Englishman had been kind to her, and for his sake she had housed and nursed this other Englishman. Thus, through Hemming's kindness, had his enemy received kindness.
END OF PART II.
PART THREE
CHAPTER I.
THE REAL GIRL
Hemming and O'Rourke, with Smith as valet-in-common, reached New York in November, and shivered in their tropical underclothes. The dismal aspect of the great city, as viewed at nine o'clock of a drizzly morning, daunted even the valet. At sight of the wide, wet streets and soaring office buildings, depressing memories of Dodder's death came to Hemming. The chill brought a twinge to O'Rourke's leg, and the swinging, clanging cars and hustling crowds offended his sense of the fitness of things.
In a four-wheeler they went direct to a bachelor apartment-house on Washington Square, in which their friend, Mr. Valentine Hicks, had engaged for them an airy suite of rooms. As they passed under the white archway, entering the old square, their moods lifted.
"I believe I'll feel all right, when I get into a woollen undershirt," said O'Rourke.