Arms and the Woman
Page 43"Hi there!" I thoughtlessly yelled in English, "where the devil are you
going?"
No one paid any attention to my cries. It was becoming a serious
matter. The lights grew fewer and fewer, and presently there were no
lights at all. We were, I judged, somewhere in the suburbs. I became
desperate and smashed a window. The carriage stopped so abruptly that
I went sprawling to the bottom. I was in anything but a peaceful frame
of mind, as they say, when the door swung open and I beheld, standing
at the side of it, the officer who had accompanied me from the frontier.
"What tomfoolery is this?" I demanded. I was thoroughly incensed.
head," was the mind-easing reply of my quondam fellow passenger. The
driver then came down from the box, and I saw that he was the officer
who had joined us at the station.
"If it is a frolic," I said, "one of your beer hall frolics, the sooner
it is ended the better for you."
The two laughed as if what I had said was one of the funniest things
imaginable.
"Get out!"
"With pleasure!" said I.
locked in my embrace. I had not spent four years on the college campus
for intellectual benefits only. And indignation lent me additional
strength. My opponent was a powerful man, but I held him in a grip of
rage. Truthfully, I began to enjoy the situation. There is something
exhilarating in the fighting blood which rises in us now and then.
This exhilaration, however, brought about my fall. In the struggle I
forgot the other, who meantime had recovered his star-gemmed senses. A
crack from the butt of his pistol rendered me remarkably quiet and
docile. In fact, all became a vacancy till the next morning, and then
through which a cat might have climbed without endangering its spine--a
very dexterous cat.
"Well," I mused, softly nursing the lump on my head, "here's the devil
to pay, and not a cent to pay him with."
It was evident that, without knowing it, I had become a very important
personage.