Page:C Q, or, In the Wireless House (Train, 1912).djvu/104

 same kind of loyalty that sends gray-haired Eton boys into battle shouting, “Floreat Etona!”—the same stupid, blind affection that led dozens of English officers in the Mutiny or the Malakand campaign to cut their way into a howling mob of Kaffirs or Afghans and carry out on their backs comrades that they hated—in a friendly sort of way. For something told him that in essence this man was a brother—one of his own clean kind, and that whatever he might have done, however desperate its character, there must be—must be—some extenuating circumstance, if not justification.

“Yes, my friend, we ’re both in the same boat, but having saved your life, I now propose to go the whole hog and make a man of you,” was the unconscious drift of Micky’s dazed cerebrations, and before he knew what he was doing he was doing precisely what he ought to have been doing, namely, dragging Cloud towards the deck-house with the idea of tucking him up in his little bed with a brandy-and-soda inside him just as Mrs. Trevelyan had said he ought to be—at Parsley Croft.

It was a dead weight that Micky had to lug along the deck for some hundred feet before he