Page:Such Is Life.djvu/249

Rh There you are!" And Cleopatra stood still; slightly panting, it is true, but with lamb-like guilelessness in his madonna face.

Then, as the toilers of the station slowly dispersed to see about getting up an appetite for supper, Moriarty advanced, and laid both hands on Cleopatra's mane.

"Collins!" he exclaimed; "I'm better pleased than if I had won ten bob. What do you think?—that verse you quoted from Shakespear brought the question to my mind like a shot of a gun; the very question I wanted to ask you a couple of hours ago. I know it's been asked before; in fact, I met with it in an English magazine, where the writer uses the very words you quoted just now. I thought perhaps you had never met with the question, and it might interest you—Was Hamlet mad?"

Of some few amiable qualities with which it has pleased heaven to endow me beyond the majority of my fellows, a Marlborough-temper is by no means the least in importance. I looked down in the ingenuous face of the searcher after wisdom, quenching, like Malvolio, my familiar smile with an austere regard of control.

"Semper felix," I observed hopelessly. "You're right in saying that the question has been asked before. It has been asked. But daylight in the morning is the right time to enter on that inquiry. For the present, we must leave the world-wearied prince to rest in his ancestral vault, where he was laid by the pious hands of Horatio and Fortinbras—where, each in his narrow cell for ever laid, the rude forefathers of The Hamlet sleep."

"Quotation—ain't it?" suggested Moriarty critically.

"No." I sighed.

"Well then, I'm beggared if I can see anything in that sort of an answer," remarked the young fellow resentfully.

"Dear boy," I replied; "I never imagined that you could. I would you had but the wit; 'twere better than your dukedom. By-the-way—what is Jack's other name?"

"Which Jack? Old Jack, or Young Jack, or Jack the Shellback, or Fog-a-bolla Jack? "

"Young Jack; the chap that offered to ride Cleopatra."

"Jack Frost."

"Right. Good-bye. And remember our arrangement."

"Good-bye, ole man. Depend your life on my straightness."

Then I whistled to Pup, noticed that Bunyip had n't got on the wrong side of the fence, and turned Cleopatra's head toward the Bogan.

G. P. R. James rightly remarks that nothing is more promotive of thought than the walking pace of a horse. We may add that nothing on earth can soothe and purify like the canter; nothing strengthen and exhilarate like the gallop. The trot is passed over with such contempt as it deserves. So, for the first mile I was soothed and purified; for the next half-mile I busied myself on a metaphysical problem; and so on for about five miles.

The metaphysical difficulty (if you care about knowing) arose in connection with the singular issue of that preposterous wager. Whence