It had been quite by chance that this man, whose name was Burke, and Corey had been attached to the same section and were thrown in that way a good deal together. And his very first statement had shown, with all the force of the casual phrase, how tremendously Corey had changed.
“A queer fellow,” he said, “no one could understand.” And he was a man, one would say, well accustomed to the queerest of men.
Mr. Ewing said yes, he supposed one would call him that, and asked just in what way Burke had thought Corey queer.
And Burke, it seemed, had had more than enough to base the idea upon. He cast about in his mind to select one out of the many queer things. And he had hit upon the most revealing one of them all.
Corey, he said, had gone about covered with medals, two rows, overlapping, on duty and off, all the time. That in itself was queer, especially for an American. Most men wore bars, but Corey had worn the whole thing. And yet, Burke said, he was the least egotistical man he had ever known. And he had seen him wince when other men, passing, had smiled at sight of his decorations. He could never make it out.
There was no wonder in that. Mr. Ewing, who knew Corey well, and had, one might say, something to go on, couldn’t make it out. And no more, for that matter, could I. There was something in it a little bizarre, and certainly alien. Surely no normal Anglo-Saxon American had ever indulged in such extremes of self-flagellation as that!
And then, abruptly and unbidden, there came into my mind a story of the old West, the story of how in the pioneer days a gambler, sitting down to play solitaire, laid his gun on the table beside him and, if he caught himself cheating, administered justice first hand by shooting himself. To be sure, in those days a man was pretty certain of playing a straight game. Well, so had Corey been, too, sure of the straightness of his game. And I have heard it vouched for that, even in those robust times, the thing had been seen to happen, and to come, with just that appalling simplicity of psychology, from cause to effect, straight, and without hesitation.
The analogy grew, for Burke averred that the queerest thing of all about Corey was that he had been the only man he had ever seen lacking entirely the emotion of fear. He volunteered on every sort of hazardous enterprise, and came through safe when men beside him were killed, time after time, protected, they had got to believe, by the inscrutable quality of his fearlessness. It was, Burke said, as if against some other secret consideration death to Corey counted nothing at all.
Then there was something a little peculiar in so silent a man having so many friends. Corey silent! Remembering him, one could hardly credit that change. Burke qualified that by saying that when he used the word silent, he didn’t in any sense mean morose. Corey had never been that. He merely hadn’t, as people somehow seemed to expect him to do, talked. And what he had meant by “friends” he wished to qualify, too. He hadn’t meant pals. There had been nothing so active as that. But there were ways to tell when a man was well liked. For example, no one who knew him had ever seen anything funny about Corey’s decorations, and they never talked about it among themselves.
Somebody had once asked Corey how long he had been over the first time. It was evident that he had been there before, because of the Croix de Guerre he wore when he came. And Corey had answered, about six weeks, or a little less.