Page:Sunset Magazine vol. 31.pdf/105

92 "So they sent you to bring me back!" grunted Croyden resentfully. "You! The colonel otta known better'n that. You otta known better. Well, I won't go."

The officer seemed not to have heard.

"Here's food" he said in a quiet voice and well-considered words "—enough for a little now, and one day's rations."

Croyden's brows contracted perplexedly but the officer went on, naming each article as he laid it out.

"Two suits of clean khaki—they belonged to Rhinehart of the Oriental Trading Company—they should fit. Collars—underclothes—a hat—" he paused.

"Did they send you to catch me?"

"That's not all—civilian shoes, an order-book and some opened trade letters of the Oriental Company. Outside you will find a calesa that will carry you to Dinlupihan. You can get across the Telegraph Trail to Subig Bay on a pony, and the Tres Hermanas clears at noon. Then money not more than enough, but all I could rake together on short notice. I wonder if that's all? Oh, yes. Travel first cabin—that's vital."

"Because, if they did send you, you've no business to do this. I don't ask it. I won't take it. I only ask 'em to send another man—and I won't go back."

Croyden had gotten to his feet. The officer placed both hands on his shoulders and looked earnestly into his face.

"I don't want you to think ill of me, Michael—even in this. I'll tell you precisely what the colonel said when the patrols found your trail leading out of Tubig. He sent me—but this way—

Herrick' he said, 'I want you to know that there isn't one of us who doesn't feel personally and bitterly what peace and consequent inaction and temptation have done for poor Croyden. He has done as much as any private soldier can do to keep the war record of the Sixteenth what it is and no one likes to think of that sort of a man as chained between a mestizo degenerate and a native criminal working his life out in Bilibid prison.

"He needn't have worried" said Croyden with a characteristic outshooting of his under jaw. "He'd never 'a seen that."

"The alternative's no more pleasant. That's not all he said. 'I know how you feel about Croyden, Herrick,' he went on, 'You and he were tossed into the world at the same rattle of the dice-box—he's all the family you've got. Now I leave this business to you—and remember, my boy, the true test of a man comes often in his ability to distinguish between rule o' thumb duty and the great Right of Mercy in the way the Finger of the Almighty traced for it across His Good Green Footstool. There's no real bad in Croyden.' That's what the colonel said."

Croyden opened his mouth as if to speak, then his head lowered.

"It's a mess I've made of it—" he mumbled incoherently—"a beautiful mess."

First cabin traffic on the little Tres Hermanas was light. There were four habitués of the smoke-room; a rosy-faced retired sea-captain on a round-the-world voyage, a rather objectionable lime-juicer from Singapore inspecting the distributing business of a British shipping firm, a rotund and tailored American of the variety that infests Pullman cars, and a solidly built young man who omitted to disclose his condition of servitude, who sometimes sat smoking and listening to the triangular controversies across the baize tables but who spent most of his time on deck or in his state-room. This young man met the American's hand-shake and garrulous"Danby's my name, sir, Sam H. Danby of Newark En Jay, good old United States of Umerrica," with "Slade—Oriental Trading–glad to know you." And, as the chatty one observed, closed like a steel trap and you couldn't pry a word out of him with a jimmy.

It developed early and often that Danby was the secretary of the only other cabin passenger on the Hermanas, a lady in whom Croyden had taken an immediate if concealed interest.

His life had not been lived under gentle influences. The only good woman he had known had been an institution matron who, after all, was only moral—scarcely good. There was a great deal about Mrs. Crownshield that was wholly new and very pleasing to Croyden.

She was a little woman, past middle age. Her silvery gray hair was brushed neatly but not severely back from her low broad forehead, and her face showed that her life had fallen in quiet places. It was kind, with a placid sweetness of which Croyden knew nothing, but there was in her eyes a look of