“I don’t believe it. Your life’s got twisted somehow. But you can straighten it. Let me help. Won’t you? Because of what you did for me just now.”
Her hand moved toward him in a tentative offer of friendship. Automatically his eyes recorded that she wore a diamond ring on the third finger. Some lucky fellow, probably some clean young man who had given no hostages to vice, had won her sweet and gallant heart.
She was all eager desire and sympathy. For a moment, as he looked into the dusky, mobile face that expressed a fine and gallant personality, it seemed possible for him to trample down the vice that was destroying him. But he pushed this aside as idle sentiment. His way was chosen for him and he could not go back.
He shook his head and turned away. The bitter, sardonic smile again rested like a shadow of evil on his good-looking face.
CHAPTER V
TUG IS “COLLECTED”
Tug followed the rails toward Wild Horse.
He groped in an abyss of humiliation and self-disgust. Slacker! The cattleman’s scornful word had cut to the quick. The taste of it was bitter. For he had not always been one. In war days he had done his share.
How was it McCrae’s poem ran?
“We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,