The regiment was coming back in a week, and then I began to think it over and cuss myself harder than ever for a natural-born fool that didn’t have enough sand to throw up the game at first and go home and face the music. It was too late then, and I couldn’t go back to Striped Rock and take all the glory that was coming to me and face Susie knowing that I was a fake. Besides, I knew the boys from Range City were liable to go up to Striped Rock any time and tell the whole story, and it froze me, inside. I didn’t know what to do, but the first thing that I had on hand was to catch them at the dock and tell them all that it meant to me and get them to promise that they wouldn’t tell. Whether I’d dare to go back and try to get Susie, I couldn’t even think. I threw up my job with the doctor and went down to the transport office to see just when they expected the boys. Little house on the dock; little hole rooms that you could scarcely turn around in. They said that the boss transport man was in the next room. I walked in. There—face to face—was Susie—Susie, pinky and whitey, her eyes just growing and growing. I couldn’t turn, I couldn’t run, I could just hang tight onto the door-knob and study the floor. The transport man went out and left us alone. And she said: “Admeh Drake, _what_ are you?” My inwards, me saying nothing all the time, said that I was a fool and a thief and a liar. I could have lied, told her that I came home ahead of the regiment, if it had been anyone but Susie. But I told her the truth, bellowed it out,—because my soul was burned paper. “I came out to see you come back,” she said, and then: “I thought that I could be proud of you.” Never another word she said, and she never looked at me again, but she threw out her hand all of a sudden and something dropped. It was the play kid-ring I gave her the night that I wish I had died. I tried to talk; I tried to hold the door; I might as well have tried to talk to the wall. The last I saw of her, the last that ever I will see, was her molassesy-gold hair going out of the big gate. I spilled out over the transport man and—O God—how I cried! I ain’t ashamed of it. You’d have cried, too. After that—I don’t know what I did. I walked over a bigger patch of hell than any man ever did alone. But the regiment’s come and gone and never found me, and I don’t know why I ain’t dead along with my insides. And they mustered out at Denver, and the boys split up and went home. Company N went back to Range City—cottonwoods shedding along the creeks, ranges all white on top, sagey smell off the foot-hills, people riding and driving in from the ranches by hundreds to see them and cheer them and feed them and hug them—but there wasn’t any hero for Striped Rock, because he had bad eyes and was a darn fool—a darn fool! CHAPTER V THE DIMES OF COFFEE JOHN