Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/375

 scabbard in his gauntleted hand. He was as gilded and as ornamental as a character from a Broadway musical comedy. But he served to bring a wayward surge of misery over the soul of the American.

McKinnon sighed, openly and audibly. He could recall, only too easily, the beginning of that vague unhappiness. It had first come to birth in the Hospital, when General Alcantara, as Alicia had called him, accompanied her to the bed in the little blue-walled ward. He was a dapper and dashing officer, and in explaining that he had once studied at West Point, Alicia suggested that the two of them might have much in common. But McKinnon had resented that youthful officer's presence at her side, from the first. From the first, too, he had despised the over-ready and white-toothed smile, the padded and punctilious little figure, the fawn-like eyes of Latin brown, as soft as a woman's. He had even more resented the panther-like grace of the scrupulously uniformed little figure, and the tropic-born cadences of the light-noted and carefully modulated voice as the two of them chatted and laughed together. It made McKinnon think of himself as awkward and ungainly, as raw and raucous in his address to women. He had maintained the pretence, to himself, that it did not matter, that it never could or