Page:Arthur Stranger--The Stranger.djvu/12

8 imagine, when you get down to hard-pan and actual performance, that I've done about as much for this country as you have."

"Have you?" inquired the man at his side, quietly and quite without rancour.

Hardy sat for a moment in thought, sniffing a phantasmal rebuff in the ironic calmness of that inquiry. Then his face lost a little of its color.

"Well, there's one thing I want to tell you. I'm not in the habit of parading my personal troubles before strangers I pick up on the road. But it may set things a little straighter,"—he paused for a moment or two, and his voice unconsciously deepened,—"when I say that I lost my boy, over there in Flanders."

Hardy could feel the wistful eyes of the other man searching his face.

"But you can at least glory in that death?" the stranger finally suggested.

"I'm not so sure that I do," Hardy found himself compelled to admit. "He was very close to me, that boy. And he was all I had. I'd always thought of him as carrying on The Works when I was through. But it fired him, that first call from overseas, and he went without a thought of anything else. He went the way they all went, for there was a Beast loose in the world, and it had to be throttled. In a way, I had nothing whatever to do with his going. And when I talk about having given my son for the cause, I know I'm only trying to cover up the old wound and salve the old ache. I had nothing to do with the giving. He gave himself!" Hardy sat gazing down into the valley plumed with smoke and crowned with the dust of traffic. He was a reticent man, and it was not often he was prompted to speak of these things.

"But to die, victorious, on the field of honor, to go gloriously, in the hour of triumph," the man beside him was saying, in a slightly tremulous voice.

Hardy, without looking up, felt the rapt eyes searching his face.

"That's just the point," he finally said, as though afraid of an emotion which he dare not explore too deeply. So he spoke with