g.

But if McCalloway were to be only a memory, Boone looked forward to a
life almost beggared. There was that solitary strain in his nature which
came perhaps of having attached himself too strongly to a few,
all-important friends. Of these McCalloway had been the chief. A
facetious fellow-member had given Boone a nickname out of Kipling in
coatroom small-talk, and the title had stuck. "Wellver," said the
representative, "is 'the cat that walks by himself, and all places are
alike to him.'"

Now, if he were not to see his old preceptor again, he must indeed walk
by himself.

With a drawn brow he thought what eventful years those five had been,
and, looking up at the unchanging hills, laughed aloud.

The North and South poles had been discovered. Portugal and China had
set up republics on the ashes of monarchy and empire. Diaz, the old
feudist lord of Mexico, had relinquished his powers and dropped out. The
Italian had fought the Ottoman; Europe's cry of "Wolf! wolf!" in the
Balkans had ceased to be an empty alarm and, burning fiercely up and
burning out, had broken again into secondary blazing. Our own armies
were on Mexican soil. In which of these abstract and epochal affairs had
his friend played a part?

Boone felt, in his heart, a newly comprehended ache for the pathos of
the veteran's life. He could realize, as he had not before realized, the
unsatisfied hungers that must have been always with that solitary
exile--a hunger appeased in part only when under some name not his own
he heard again the call of the bugles and followed the flight of the
war-eagles.

Manifestly, for all their closeness of thought and companionship, he had
only seen a part of the man McCalloway. There must be facets in the
stone even finer than those he knew, which had never been revealed to
him. He had seen--often--the warmth of affection like the softened glow
of a diamond lying on a jeweller's velvet, and--on occasion--the keen,
cold brightness of unyielding strength, but there must have been, too,
white spurts of blaze almost dazzling in their fierce lustre which it
had taken the battlefield to bring out.

And these he did not know.

He had just been reading a paper with which the gentleman had beguiled
many a lonely winter night and which he had left unfinished. It was a
critical analysis of Hector Dinwiddie's career and military thought,
undertaken at the request of Basil Prince.

Prince himself had been a historian, and ye