So many different kinds of feeling had been chasing around inside of me that I had numb spots in my emotional ornaments and intellectual organs. The room cleared out of everybody but Doctor Kirby and Colonel Tom and me. But the sound of the crowd going into the road, and their footsteps dying away, and then after that their voices quitting, all made but very little sense to me. I could scarcely realize that the dan-ger was over.
I hadn't been paying much attention to Doctor Kirby while the colonel was making that grand-stand play of his'n, and getting away with it. Doc-tor Kirby was setting in his chair with his head sort of sunk on his chest. I guess he was having a hard time himself to realize that all the danger was past.
But mebby it wasn't that--he looked like he might really of forgot where he was fur a minute, and might be thinking of something that had happened a long time ago.
The colonel was leaning up agin the teacher's desk, smoking and looking at Doctor Kirby.
Doctor Kirby turns around toward the colonel.
"You have saved my life," he says, getting up out of his chair, like he had a notion to step over and thank him fur it, but was somehow not quite sure how that would be took.
The colonel looks at him silent fur a second, and then he says, without smiling:
"Do you flatter yourself it was because I think it worth anything?"The doctor don't answer, and then the colonel says:
"Has it occurred to you that I may have saved it because I want it?""WANT it?"
"Do you know of any one who has a better right to TAKE it than I have? Perhaps I saved it because it BELONGS to me--do you suppose I want any one else to kill what I have the best right to kill?""Tom," says Doctor Kirby, really puzzled, to judge from his actions, "I don't understand what makes you say you have the right to take my life.""Dave, where is my sister buried?" asts Colonel Tom.
"Buried?" says Doctor Kirby. "My God, Tom, is she DEAD?""I ask you," says Colonel Tom.
"And I ask you," says Doctor Kirby.
And they looked at each other, both wonderized, and trying to understand. And it busted on me all at oncet who them two men really was.
I orter knowed it sooner. When the colonel was first called Colonel Tom Buckner it struck me Iknowed the name, and knowed something about it.
But things which was my own consarns was attract-ing my attention so hard I couldn't remember what it was I orter know about that name. Then I seen him and Doctor Kirby knowed each other when they got that first square look. That orter of put me on the track, that and a lot of other things that had happened before. But I didn't piece things together like I orter done.
It wasn't until Colonel Tom Buckner called him "Dave" and ast him about his sister that I seen who Doctor Kirby must really be.
HE WAS THAT THERE DAVID ARMSTRONG!
And the brother of the girl he had run off with had jest saved his life. By the way he was talking, he had saved it simply because he thought he had the first call on what to do with it.
"Where is she?" asts Colonel Tom.
"I ask you," says Doctor Kirby--or David Armstrong--agin.
Well, I thinks to myself, here is where Daniel puts one acrost the plate. And I breaks in:
"You both got another guess coming," I says.
"She ain't buried anywheres. She ain't even dead.
She's living in a little town in Indiany called Athens --or she was about eighteen months ago."They both looks at me like they thinks I am crazy.
"What do you know about it?" says Doctor Kirby.
"Are you David Armstrong?" says I.
"Yes," says he.
"Well," I says, "you spent four or five days within a stone's throw of her a year ago last summer, and she knowed it was you and hid herself away from you."Then I tells them about how I first happened to hear of David Armstrong, and all I had hearn from Martha. And how I had stayed at the Davises in Tennessee and got some more of the same story from George, the old nigger there.
"But, Danny," says the doctor, "why didn't you tell me all this?"I was jest going to say that not knowing he was that there David Armstrong I didn't think it any of his business, when Colonel Tom, he says to Doctor Kirby--I mean to David Armstrong:
"Why should you be concerned as to her where-abouts? You ruined her life and then deserted her."Doctor Kirby--I mean David Armstrong--stands there with the blood going up his face into his forehead slow and red.
"Tom," he says, "you and I seem to be working at cross purposes. Maybe it would help some if you would tell me just how badly you think Itreated Lucy."
"You ruined her life, and then deserted her,"says Colonel Tom agin, looking at him hard.
"I DIDN'T desert her," said Doctor Kirby. "She got disgusted and left ME. Left me without a chance to explain myself. As far as ruining her life is concerned, I suppose that when I married her--""Married her!" cries out the colonel. And David Armstrong stares at him with his mouth open.
"My God! Tom," he says, "did you think --?"And they both come to another standstill.
And then they talked some more and only got more mixed up than ever. Fur the doctor thinks she has left him, and Colonel Tom thinks he has left her.
"Tom," says the doctor, "suppose you let me tell my story, and you'll see why Lucy left me."Him and Colonel Tom had been chums together when they went through Princeton, it seems--Ipicked that up from the talk and some of his story I learned afterward. He had come from Ohio in the beginning, and his dad had had considerable money. Which he had enjoyed spending of it, and when he was a young feller never liked to work at nothing else. It suited him. Colonel Tom, he was considerable like him in that way. So they was good pals when they was to that school together.
They both quit about the same time. A couple of years after that, when they was both about twenty-five or six years old, they run acrost each other accidental in New York one autumn.
The doctor, he was there figgering on going to work at something or other, but they was so many things to do he was finding it hard to make a choice.
