een Carter Van Meter like this,--cool Carter, with
his little elegancies of dress and manner, his studied detachment. This
was a different person altogether,--hot-eyed, white-lipped, snarling.
"Your fault if she dies here, dies of thirst; your fault if they get in
here and carry her off, those filthy brutes out there."

"They'll never ... get her," said Jimsy King. His face was scarlet and
he was breathing hard and clenching and unclenching his hands.

"Yes," Carter sneered, "yes! I know what you mean! You feel very heroic
about it. You feel like a hero in a movie, don't you? Noble of you,
isn't it? Slay the heroine with your own hands rather than let her----"

"Oh, for God's sake, Cart'!" Jimsy got up and came toward him. "Cut it
out! What's the good of talking like that? We're in it now, all of us,
and we've got to stick it out. I know it's harder on you because you're
not strong, but----"

"Damn you! 'Not strong--' Not built like an ox--muscles in my brain
instead of my legs! Because I cared for something else besides rolling
around in the mud with a leather ball in my arms----"

"Key down, old boy." Jimsy was cool now, unresentful; he understood.
Poor old Cart' ... he couldn't stand much suffering.

"That's how you got Honor, when she was a child, with no sense of
values, but you haven't held her! You can't hold her."

"Cart', I'm not going to get sore at you. I know you're about all in.
You don't know what you're saying."

"Don't I? Don't I? You listen to me. Honor Carmody never really loved
you; it was a silly boy-and-girl, calf love affair, and when she
realized it she stood by, of course,--she's that sort. She kept the
letter of her promise, but she couldn't keep the spirit."

"Key down, old top," said Jimsy King again, grinning. "I'm not going to
get sore, but I don't want to use up my breath laughing at you.
_Skipper_--going back on me!" He did laugh, ringingly.

"She hasn't gone back on you; except in her heart. Good God, Jimsy
King, what do you think you are to hold a girl like that--with her
talent and her success and her future? She's only stuck by you because
it was her creed, that's all."

"Look here, Cart', I'm not going to argue with you. It's not on the
square to Skipper even to talk about it, but don't be a crazy fool.
Would she have come to me here--from Italy, if she didn't----"

"Yes. Yes, she would! She's pledged to see it through--to stand by you
as all the other miserable women hav