“Aha, my fighter of the H. B. C.,” he laughed from his seat against a towering maple, “have your laggard wits come in from wool-gathering?”
He, too, was more comfortably bound, and McElroy noticed that there were little rubbed creases in the sleeves of the gay blue coat where the numbing bonds had cut. The sparkling spirit was as high in his handsome face as it had been that long past morning morning by the well. The factor wondered if there was in heaven or earth anything with power to dim it.
He was to see, and marvel at, the test.
“Aye,” he answered the cheerful query; “it has been a weary day, M'sieu, it would seem, with my senses drifting out and in at ragged intervals of which I have only vague impressions. How has it fared with you?”
“Much as another day. There has been plenty to see and enjoy, even from under the feet of our hasty friends of the paddles.”
“Enjoy! Holy Mother! Have you not been thinking over your sins, M'sieu?”
“Sins? I have none. Who thinks of sins while the red blood runs? Rather have I dreamed dreams of,—memories. Ah, no, M'sieu, it has not been a weary day to me, but one of swift emotions, of riots of colour in a strip of racing sky when the sun turned his palette for a gorgeous spread. The sunset was stupendous at its beginning. Now the darker greys come with so much forest.”
McElroy fell silent, biting his lip.
Sorry as he felt for the plight of his rival, the old anger was close to his heart, and it seemed that the rascal knew it and probed for a weak spot with his smiling allusions to his memories. Memories of what but of the red lips of a girl?
The young factor, too, had memories of those red lips, though they gave him only a pain so bitter as not to be borne.