ompanying him home, but this seemed less from a
desire to see me again than to protest against my having publicly
humiliated him by treating him as demented. He had always thought that
David Malcolm would understand him under every circumstance; that
whatever his condition and whatever mine, when we met again it would be
with mutual esteem. Yet David Malcolm had judged him by his clothes,
had given him a waiter's heart and mind with a waiter's garb! He was
bent on proving to me that, however low he might have fallen in the
world's eye, he was as sane as he ever had been, and that in accepting
O'Corrigan's opinion so readily I had done him a wrong.

Now when we were sitting in his room, so close that our knees touched,
he seemed by his silence to tell me that he had spoken, and that my
part was to excuse and to explain what he deemed a reflection on
himself. I saw him in his shabby waiter's garb. This was the uniform
in which he marched, moved night after night with shuffling feet and
eyes alert lest he break the dishes--marched to the divine drumbeat,
marched under God's sealed orders. His own high-flowing phrases came
back to me, and I could have laughed, seeing him, but I remembered that
those phrases had been the sabre cuts which drove me into action, that
but for them I might be dozing like the very dogs, dozing with the
unhappy restlessness of enforced inaction. Perhaps I was moving to
barren conquests, but barren conquests are better than defeat. He had
moved to defeat, and I pitied him. He asked of me excuse and
explanation. I, having none to give, was silent. But I think he must
have seen in my eyes something of the same light which he found in them
that morning in the smoky cabin. Then he had reached down, taken me in
his arms and called me his only friend. Now with a sudden movement he
held out his hand to mine. Anger was gone. He had forgotten Talcott.
He had forgotten the stranger who seized his arm and thwarted his fury.
He saw only the boy who yesterday had stood at his side when every
man's hand was against him.

"Davy--Davy," he cried, "you have come again to help me."

"Yes--to take you home," said I, "to your brother and Penelope."

He made a gesture of dissent and his eyes narrowed. "No," he returned
with sharpness. "That cannot be. Don't you suppose that I should have
gone to them of my own accord had it been possible?"

"But it is possible," I said. "They want you. I have it