Hollins came out, and I heard him
muttering to himself. He fawned on Abbot while he was in the tent, but
he was scowling and gritting his teeth when he left; and I heard him
cursing _sotto voce_, until he suddenly caught sight of me. Then he was
all joviality, and took me by the arms to tell me how 'Paul, old boy,
has been raking me over the coals. We were chums, you know, and he
thinks a heap of me, and don't want the home people to know of my
getting on a spree,' was the way he explained it. Now, if you remember,
it was Hollins who was perpetually alluding to his intimacy with the
Abbots. Paul himself never spoke of it. What Palfrey once told me in
Washington may explain it; he said that Hollins was distantly related to
the Winthrops, and that there was a time when he and Miss Winthrop were
quite inseparable--you know what a handsome fellow he was when he first
joined us?"

"Well," answers the captain, with the half-way and reluctant withdrawal
of the average man who has made an unjust statement, "it may be as you
say, but all the same it was Abbot's tacit endorsement or tolerance that
enabled Hollins to hold a place among us as long as he has. If he has
been sheltered under the shadow of Abbot's wing, and turns out to be a
vagabond, so much the worse for the wing. All the same, I'm glad of
Abbot's promotion. Wonder whose staff he goes on?"

"Lieutenant," says a corporal, saluting the group and addressing his
company commander, "Rix says he would like to speak with the major
before breakfast. He was for going to headquarters alone just now, but I
told him he must wait until I had seen you."

The lieutenant glances quickly around. There, not ten paces away--his
forage cap on the back of his head, his hulking shoulders more bent
than ever, hands in his pockets and a scowl on his face--stands, or
rather slouches, Rix. He looks unkempt, dirty, determinedly ugly, and
very much as though he had been in liquor most of the week, and was
sober now only through adverse circumstances over which he had no
control.

"What do you want of the major, Rix?" demands the lieutenant, with
military directness.

"Well, I _want_ him--'n that's enough," says the ex-teamster, with
surly, defiant manner, and never changing his attitude. "I want t' know
what I'm sent back here for, like a criminal."

"Because you look most damnably like one," says the officer,
impulsively, and then, ashamed of having said such a thing to one who is
pow