Roy Norton

“ Ever in the colonel's memory lingers a picture of that encircling jungle, which grew thick and rank around the cabin, spreading a shade of trees, a tangle of vines, and a blanket of creepers over dead men's bones—jungle where his horse had stumbled over bared skulls, the last somber relics in a country so infested and overridden by twenty years of war that the buzzards still hover in the skies from force of habit. ”

“ In a delirium of exultation over what I considered my liberation, I led the last charge, the one man perhaps who went up the lead-swept hill with a song of battle in his heart because he believed that his greatest fight had been won, and was elated that a thing greater than death, his own soul's cowardice, had been mastered. ”

“ Looming always before me was the certainty that never again could I look into the face of any man who had known me, without searching into his eyes for the flicker of contempt that would never be found wanting. So in that gray hour when the slow dawn crept up over hills that stared blackly at me, when the dance-halls were all quiet and the click of the roulette wheels stilled, I saddled the only friend that did not know of my disgrace and rode away—rode like hell to escape memory—a hopeless and never-ending race. ”

“ There is commiseration for the man who tries hard and fails, and sorrow for the man who gamely fights and falls; but for a coward nothing but pitiless comment and open jeer. That is the way of the West—my West, the one I knew and reveled in and loved as a man loves his sweetheart. ”

“ That was the kind of jungle which halted around Barth's clearing, lying in wait to creep in stealthily, and there, too, bring obliteration, But another picture was indelibly impressed on the colonel that night by the entrance of a beautiful young Spanish woman, whose eyes, as she came in, touched those of Barth with a caress of adoration.
The dinner by candlelight was good, very good indeed to a man whose stomach rebelled against the everlasting sameness of Cuban cooking. ”

“ It was in the tropical gloom, lighted only by stars, with fireflies weaving a fantastic atmospheric dance to night-birds' singing, that Barth told bis story. The tale was punctuated with long pauses, when neither of the men spoke, and only the fitful fire: of their pipes showed that here were two together. Barth's pipe went out as the story progressed, and the stem of the colonel's was bitten in two.
There is nothing much harder than to hear a game man, one who has pride in himself and his work, tell you of cowardice such as was his ”