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"Cicely," he said, "have you forgotten that you made me a promise?" "O Jim," she said, without looking at him, "don't speak to me. I have behaved very badly to you." "You never wanted to marry him," said Mackenzie roughly. "He's not the husband for a girl of any spirit." Jim made no sign of having heard him. His face was still turned towards Cicely. "It has been my fault," he said.
And when Jim got so he could believe it WAS the land of Egypt he was looking at, he wouldn't enter it standing up, but got down on his knees and took off his hat, because he said it wasn't fitten' for a humble poor nigger to come any other way where such men had been as Moses and Joseph and Pharaoh and the other prophets.
"They caught the darned red devils and strapped them on a horse, and swore that if they didn't just lead the way to their camp that they'd blow their b brains out; and Jim Baker wasn't the coon to go under if he said he'd do it no, you bet he wasn't. So the red devils showed the trail, and soon the boys came out on a wide gulch, and saw down below the lodges of the Pagans.
"Gilbert looked to me like an insane man. Jim, you're crazy as he was, to say anything else. Never supposed for a minute you thought otherwise that poor girl there, dazed with fright, backed as far away from him as she could get, hair flying, eyes wild." I looked from one to the other.
"That's an elegant instrument," was her observation, as she flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the case. Polly opened the lid, saying: "Just what Echo wanted." Jim cocked his head, as if he were examining a new pinto pony. "Sent all the way up to Kansas City for it, eh?" "That's right, Uncle Jim," chorused the punchers. "Now the room's complete," announced Polly.
No, but it was that mother and daughter both saw, too plainly, that Jim was going down-hill, and that too with quickening steps. They saw that he was getting the slave of the drink, and they feared that there was worse behind; and, of course, there was: for when did ever the drink-fiend get an immortal being into his grasp without bringing a companion demon along with him?
He told her to ask him again in a month. But during the course of dinner she gathered from some disjointed remarks of his that he and Bibbs had lunched together at the small restaurant where it had been Sheridan's custom to lunch with Jim, and she took this to be an encouraging sign.
"It is when it's not alive," acknowledged the girl. "But this sawhorse can trot as fast as you can, Jim; and he's very wise, too." "Pah! I'll race the miserable wooden donkey any day in the week!" cried the cab-horse. Dorothy did not reply to that. She felt that Jim would know more about the Saw-Horse later on.
Jim don't seem very sanguine about it. Poor fellow, he's got the spirit all taken out of him." "Well, well, we'll put it back again, see if we don't, before the year is out," replied Hetty, with a beaming smile, which made her face beautiful. It happened fortunately that poor Sarah Little first came to her new home alone, rather than with her husband.
During this part of the programme the women and men of the banqueting party who were to appear in the fancy-dress ball at twelve retired to the rooms above to dress for their parts. Nan left Stuart with a pretty sigh to arrange her costume. "I'm sorry you never learned to dance, Jim, but there are compensations to-night. I've a surprise for you later."
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