Then his face seemed to harden. It was all in his eyes, and they were bleak and cold.
“But that devil had better not get gay. If worst comes to worst, I’ll kick him out of the Army, resign myself, and hit the road.”
He sort of grated that out, and I cut in hastily:
“As a matter of fact, he’d better not slip on the cards or the rest of it, or I’ll personally get him. He doesn’t strike me as any credit to the Army.”
“He’ll be too smart for that—around the field, anyway. I suppose I’m a coward; but I’ll be miserable while he’s here. I’m hoping he won’t be tempted to do his stuff. Honest, Slim, what do you think? That I’ll be a damn’ heel to introduce him around? That I ought to give him away to start?”
“No,” I told him, after no thought whatever. “Maybe he’s reformed. Anybody you introduce him to will be free, white, twenty-one and able to look out for himself. And I see no reason for you to open up a knife, sharpen it and stick it in your own gizzard before it’s necessary.”
“Well, it won’t take long to make it necessary. He’ll hang around my neck just once too often.”
With that I left him for the bath-house, there to get washed, polished and highly perfumed. During the rest of the day no loud “ho-ho-ho!” rang out over the field. If I had any tendency to forget the situation, Penoch’s set face was a constant reminder. Consequently, you won’t find it hard to believe that I accepted Penoch’s invitation to become a member of the welcoming committee. I accepted agilely, as a matter of fact, and the witching hour of three forty-five found us tooling his dilapidated old roadster down the thronged main street of McMullen, as quietly as a flock of tanks.
McMullen is one of those new, shiny, progressive little Texas cities, where transportation includes cow-ponies and Rolls Royces. It is a mixture of the old and the new. A completely equipped, honest-to-God old cowboy will tie up his horse in front of a store that sells Parisian gowns.