He looked me over for a moment and muttered, “Trés bien ... trés bien ... I t’ought you make cooked-up lie before zis.” He admitted that he believed us now, but still he did not seem to be entirely happy over the discovery of his error. He left us with Lisa and I heard him moving around, first in the barroom and then outdoors, as if he were looking for something. We had been there perhaps ten minutes when Ben appeared in the door, asking stupidly if we had seen the pup. “He ain’t outside,” he declared, as if that were news. “He ain’t outside.” I whistled and called and finally Esky appeared from within, lapping his jaws from the feast he had just had. Old Pierre tried to get him to come to him, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with him, just got behind Ben’s legs and looked at Pierre sort of queerly, so much as to say, “I’ll eat your meat, but I don’t want to have anything to do with you.” Ben took him out. A moment later we bade good-by to the Lenotiers and joined Ben at the corner. As it was early yet, I suggested that we take a walk to the park and give Ben a chance to get some air. So we walked away and found a bench, whereon Ben flopped down and promptly began to doze off, with the result that Leon and I had an opportunity to talk about ourselves to a certain extent. I gathered a lot from what Leon told me and now I could better understand the change that had come over him: for he certainly was a different man altogether. It seems that the mood in which he went to Booneville passed away as soon as his arm began to heal, and he had nothing to do but think about how rotten he was. The solitude—of whose virtues and beauties he had sung so often—closed about him depressingly and even the sounds of his own voice came back at him with echoes and reëchoes from the hills. He had never been sociable nor friendly, and the natives of Booneville cast suspicious glances at him upon the infrequent occasions of his visits to the post office. He discovered that the torments of loneliness, of strange-noised nights and uneventful days, were far worse than any of the fancied or real horrors of war. I guess he made up his mind then that the army was a better place for him than Booneville, and I don’t think he cared a great deal whether he succeeded in getting across to rescue me: his idea was simply to go out and do something that would revive his self-respect and prove to himself that he was no weakling or coward.