“Can you walk?” demanded Gibbs.
“Yes,” and the doctor scrambled to his feet. “Course I can walk!”
“Come along then,” cried Gibbs, seizing Arling's hat and thrusting it into his hands.
“Stop a minute, where's Landray now?” asked Arling, reasonably sober.
“Home and in bed. I told Mrs. Bassett to give him hot whisky.”
“Nothing better than that!” said Arling.
As soon as he had left the doctor in charge of his friend, Gibbs hurried off across the back lots. He was going for his Julia.
“This is a hell of a place!” he moaned miserably, as he stumbled along through the darkness. “I wish I'd never got him to come here; but I couldn't foresee how things would pan out!”
His was a simple emotional nature, but he was capable of no little depth of feeling, and he loved Landray as his own son. He wanted him to live, he wanted to vindicate to him his own capacity for a substantial success. It hurt him that he should think, as he sometimes fancied he did think, that he was impractical and erratic; he wanted him to know just the sort of man General Nathan Gibbs really was; for externals bore hard upon his character, and he was aware without his Julia telling him of it, that Gibbs of the Golden West Saloon was but a poor shadow of the epauletted soldier who seven years before had turned his florid face and expanded chest toward the new West. Those had been his great days, but in some form they must return; he never doubted this.
“What a shabby guzzling hound I've become!” he told himself in his abasement and disgust. “I wish he could think well of me, for he's the only gentleman left in Grant City.”