's handled you?"

George slowly rose to his feet. "Man named Scholes--down East" he
answered. He eyed Yorke's face ruefully and, incidentally felt his own,
"I used to do a bit with the gloves when I was at McGill. Talking about
sponges!--I only wish we had one now to chuck up--in tangible form."

He abstracted the other's handkerchief and, rolling it with his own into
a pad dabbed it in the snow. Yorke winced. "Hold still, old thing!"
said Redmond, "we'll have to clean off a bit ere we hit the giddy trail
again."

For some minutes he gently manipulated the pad. "There! you don't look
too bad now. Have a go at me!"

Figuratively, they licked each other's wounds awhile. Yorke had grown
very silent. Chin in hands and rocking very slightly to and fro, all
huddled up in his fur coat, he gazed unseeingly into the beyond. His
face was clouded with such hopeless, bitter, brooding misery that it
worried Redmond. He guessed it to be something far deeper than the
memory of their recent conflict. He strove to arouse the other.

"Talk about game cocks!" he began lightly. "Ten years ago, say! you must
have been a corker--regular 'Terry McGovern'."

"Eh?" Yorke's far-away eyes stared at him vaguely. "I was in India
then. Army light-weight champion in my day. Slavin wasn't joshing much
at breakfast, by gum! . . . Now we're here! . . . We're a bright pair!"
He made as though to cast snow upon his head, "Ichabod! Ichabod! our
glory has departed!"

He lifted up his tenor voice, chanting the while he rocked--

"_Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha' mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!_"

Redmond flinched and raised a weakly protesting hand. "Don't, old man!"
he implored miserably, "don't! what's the--"

"Eh!" queried Yorke brutally--rocking--"does hurt?"

"_If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep,
And all we--_"

"No! no! no! Yorkey!" George's voice rose to a cry, "not that! . . .
quit it, old man! . . . that's one of the most terrible things Kipling
ever wrote--terrible because it's so absolutely, utterly hopeless. . . ."

"Well, then!" said Yorke slowly--

"_Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?_"

"It wasn't beer," muttered Redmond absently, "it was whiskey. Slavic and
I drank it." With an effort he strove to arouse himself out of the
despondency that he himself had fallen into.

"Listen! . . . Oh! quit that