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Page 11
"Perhaps they're not _all_ thieves," said the District Attorney,
cheerfully, as he hit the circle around him with a handful of coppers;
"but there is no doubt about it that they're all blind. Which is the
more to be pitied," he asked the Consul-General, "the man who has
still to be found out and who can see, or the one who has been exposed
and who is blind?"
"How should he know?" said Carroll, laughing. "He's never been blind,
and he still holds his job."
"I don't think that's very funny," said the Consul-General.
A week of pig-sticking came to end Holcombe's stay in Tangier, and he
threw himself into it and into the freedom of its life with a zest
that made even the Englishman speak of him as a good fellow. He
chanced to overhear this, and stopped to consider what it meant. No
one had ever called him a good fellow at home, but then his life had
not offered him the chance to show what sort of a good fellow he might
be, and as Judge Holcombe's son certain things had been debarred him.
Here he was only the richest tourist since Farwell, the diamond
smuggler from Amsterdam, had touched there in his yacht.
[Illustration: The boar hunt.]
The week of boar-hunting was spent out-of-doors, on horseback, and in
tents; the women in two wide circular ones, and the men in another,
with a mess tent, which they shared in common, pitched between them.
They had only one change of clothes each, one wet and one dry, and
they were in the saddle from nine in the morning until late at night,
when they gathered in a wide circle around the wood-fire and played
banjoes and listened to stories. Holcombe grew as red as a sailor, and
jumped his horse over gaping crevasses in the hard sun-baked earth as
recklessly as though there were nothing in this world so well worth
sacrificing one's life for as to be the first in at a dumb brute's
death. He was on friendly terms with them all now--with Miss Terrill,
the young girl who had been awakened by night and told to leave Monte
Carlo before daybreak, and with Mrs. Darhah, who would answer to Lady
Taunton if so addressed, and with Andrews, the Scotch bank clerk, and
Ollid the boy officer from Gibraltar, who had found some difficulty in
making the mess account balance. They were all his very good friends,
and he was especially courteous and attentive to Miss Terrill's wants
and interests, and fixed her stirrup and once let her pass him to
charge the boar in his place. She was a silently distant young woman,
and strangely gentle for one who had had to leave a place, and such a
place, between days; and her hair, which was very fine and light, ran
away from under her white helmet in disconnected curls. At night,
Holcombe used to watch her from out of the shadow when the firelight
lit up the circle and the tips of the palms above them, and when the
story-teller's voice was accompanied by bursts of occasional laughter
from the dragomen in the grove beyond, and the stamping and neighing
of the horses at their pickets, and the unceasing chorus of the insect
life about them. She used to sit on one of the rugs with her hands
clasped about her knees, and with her head resting on Mrs. Hornby's
broad shoulder, looking down into the embers of the fire, and with the
story of her life written on her girl's face as irrevocably as though
old age had set its seal there. Holcombe was kind to them all now,
even to Meakim, when that gentleman rode leisurely out to the camp
with the mail and the latest Paris _Herald_, which was their one
bond of union with the great outside world.
Carroll sat smoking his pipe one night, and bending forward over the
fire to get its light on the pages of the latest copy of this paper.
Suddenly he dropped it between his knees. "I say, Holcombe," he cried,
"here's news! Winthrop Allen has absconded with three hundred thousand
dollars, and no one knows where."
Holcombe was sitting on the other side of the fire, prying at the
rowel of his spur with a hunting-knife. He raised his head and
laughed. "Another good man gone wrong, hey?" he said.
Carroll lowered the paper slowly to his knee and stared curiously
through the smoky light to where Holcombe sat intent on the rowel of
his spur. It apparently absorbed his entire attention, and his last
remark had been an unconsciously natural one. Carroll smiled grimly as
he folded the paper across his knee. "Now are the mighty fallen,
indeed," he murmured. He told Meakim of it a few minutes later, and
they both marvelled. "It's just as I told him, isn't it, and he
wouldn't believe me. It's the place and the people. Two weeks ago he
would have raged. Why, Meakim, you know Allen--Winthrop Allen? He's
one of Holcombe's own sort; older than he is, but one of his own
people; belongs to the same clubs; and to the same family, I think,
and yet Harry took it just as a matter of course, with no more
interest, than if I'd said that Allen was going to be married."
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