Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/311

291 this man who had always misunderstood life as the living had misunderstood him.

Then my wits came back to me, and I pushed my way in between the two men so coldly eying each other.

"Bud!" I cried out. But he refused to look at me.

"Well, what d' you want?" was his none too gentle reply.

"Bud, they told me you were dead," I went on, desperately intent on distracting him from any wild end which he might have in view.

"I was as good as dead, I guess," he retorted, with a movement for me to step aside. But I stayed where I was.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded.

He stared at me with a look of hostility in his haggard eye.

"That's a question I want you to answer," he retorted.

I realized as I stared back at him, that it takes time to digest a mental shock. I still found it hard to think of him as a flesh-and-blood human being. For over two years the habit of accepting him as dead had been fixing itself in my mind. And it wasn't easy to break a habit as fixed as that.