“Now we, who know what brutes brute fear will make of men, are not going to deny that those boys behaved badly. There are some things that can't be acknowledged among men, you know, if there is a hole to crawl out of. Cowardice is one of them. Well then, they lied, that's the whole of it. The little boys lied. They wrote Mrs. Bogardus a long letter from Lemhi,”--the doctor was reviewing now for Mrs. Creve's benefit,--“when they first got out. They probably judged, by the time they had had, that Paul and the packer would never tell their own story. Very well: it couldn't hurt Paul, it might be the saving of them, if they could show that something had queered him in the woods. They asked his mother if she had heard of the effects of altitude upon highly sensitive organizations. They recounted some instances--I will mention them later. One of the boys is a lawyer, isn't he? They are a pair of ingenious youths. Bogardus, they claim, avoided them almost from the time they entered the woods,--almost lived with the packer, behaved like a crank about the shooting. Whereas they had gone there to kill things, he made it a personal matter whenever they pursued this intention in a natural and undisguised manner. He had pangs, like a girl, when the creatures expired. He hated the carcases, the blood--forgive me, Mrs. Creve. In short, he called the whole business butchery.” “Do you make _that_ a sign of lunacy?” Mrs. Creve flung in. “I am quoting, you know.” The doctor smiled indulgently. “They declare that they offered--even begged--to stay behind with him, one of them, at least, but he rejected their company in a manner so unpleasant that they saw it would only be courting a quarrel to remain. And so, treating him perforce like a child _or_ a lunatic _pro tem._, and having but little time to decide in, they cut loose and hurried back for help. This is the tale, composed on reflection. They said nothing of this to Winslow--to save publicity, of course! Mrs. Bogardus's lips are doubly sealed, for her son's sake and for the sake of the young scamp who is to be her son, by and by! I saw she winced at my opinion, which I gave her plainly--brutally, perhaps. And she asked me particularly to say nothing, which I am particularly not doing. “This, I think, you will find is the bitter drop in the cup of rejoicing upstairs. And they are swallowing it in silence, those two, for the sake of the little girl and the old friends in New York. Of course she has kept from Paul that last shot in the back from those sweet boys! The packer had some unruly testimony he was bursting with, which he had sense enough to keep for her alone, and she doesn't want the case to spread. It is singular how a man in his condition could get out of the way as suddenly as he did. You might think he'd been taken up in a cloud.” “Doctor, what do you mean by such an insinuation as that?” “Colonel, have I insinuated anything? Did I say she had oiled the wheels of his departure?”