Mat was sitting by the table, with his rifle laid across his knees, and was scouring the barrel bright with a piece of sand paper. By his side was an unsnuffed candle, an empty bottle, and a tumbler with a little raw brandy left in the bottom of it. His face, when he looked up, showed that he had been drinking hard. There was a stare in his eyes that was at once fierce and vacant, and a hard, fixed, unnatural smile on his lips which Zack did not at all like to see.
"Why, Mat, old boy!" he said soothingly, "you look a little out of sorts. What's wrong?"
Mat scoured away at the barrel of the gun harder than ever, and gave no answer.
"What, in the name of wonder, can you be scouring your rifle for to-night?" continued young Thorpe. "You have never yet touched it since you brought it into the house. What can you possibly want with it now? We don't shoot birds in England with rifle bullets."
"A rifle bullet will do for my game, if I put it up," said Mat, suddenly and fiercely fixing his eyes on Zack.
"What game does he mean?" thought young Thorpe. "He's been drinking himself pretty nearly drunk. Can anything have happened to him since we parted company at the theater?—I should like to find out; but he's such an old savage when the brandy's in his head, that I don't half like to question him—"
Here Zack's reflections were interrupted by the voice of his eccentric friend.
"Did you ever meet with a man of the name of Carr?" asked Mat. He looked away from young Thorpe, keeping his eyes steadily on the rifle, and rubbing hard at the barrel, as he put this question.
"No," said Zack. "Not that I can remember."
Mat left off cleaning the gun, and began to fumble awkwardly in one of his pockets. After some little time, he produced what appeared to Zack to be an inordinately long letter, written in a cramped hand, and superscribed apparently with two long lines of inscription, instead of an ordinary address. Opening this strange-looking document, Mat guided himself a little way down the lines on the first page with a very unsteady forefinger—stopped, and read somewhat anxiously and with evident difficulty—then put the letter back in his pocket, dropped his eyes once more on the gun in his lap, and said with a strong emphasis on the Christian name:—
"Arthur Carr?"
"No," returned Zack. "I never met with a man of that name. Is he a friend of yours?"
Mat went on scouring the rifle barrel.
Young Thorpe said nothing more. He had been a little puzzled early in the evening, when his friend had exhibited the fan and tobacco pouch (neither of which had been produced before), and had mentioned to Mr. Blyth that they were once intended for "a woman" who was now dead. Zack had thought this conduct rather odd at the time; but now, when it was followed by these strangely abrupt references to the name of Carr, by this mysterious scouring of the rifle and desperate brandy drinking in solitude, he began to feel perplexed in the last degree about Mat's behavior. "Is this about Arthur Carr a secret of the old boy's?" Zack asked himself with a sort of bewildered curiosity. "Is he letting out more than he ought, I wonder, now he's a little in liquor?"
While young Thorpe was pondering thus, Mat was still industriously scouring the barrel of his rifle. After the silence in the room had lasted some minutes, he suddenly threw away his morsel of sand-paper, and spoke again.
"Zack," he said, familiarly smacking the stock of his rifle, "me and you had some talk once about going away to the wild country over the waters together. I'm ready to sail when you are, if—" He had glanced up at young Thorpe with his vacant bloodshot eyes, as he spoke the last words. But he checked himself almost at the same moment, and looked away again quickly at the gun.
"If what?" asked Zack.
"If I can lay my hands first on Arthur Carr," answered Mat, with very unusual lowness of tone. "Only let me do that, and I shall be game to tramp it at an hour's notice. He may be dead and buried for anything I know—"
"Then what's the use of looking after him?" interposed Zack.
"The use is, I've got it into my head that he's alive, and that I shall find him," returned Mat.
"'Well?" said young Thorpe eagerly.
Mat became silent again. His head drooped slowly forward, and his body followed it till he rested his elbows on the gun. Sitting in this crouched-up position, he abstractedly began to amuse himself by snapping the lock of the rifle. Zack, suspecting that the brandy he had swallowed was beginning to stupefy him, determined, with characteristic recklessness, to rouse him into talking at any hazard.
"What the devil is all this mystery about?" he cried boldly. "Ever since you pulled out that feather-fan and tobacco-pouch at Blyth's—"
"Well, what of them?" interrupted Mat, looking up instantly with a fierce, suspicious stare.
"Nothing particular," pursued Zack, undauntedly, "except that it's odd you never brought them out before; and odder still that you should tell Blyth, and never say a word here to me, about getting them for a woman—"
"What of her?" broke out Mat, rising to his feet with flushed face and threatening eyes, and making the room ring again as he grounded his rifle on the floor.
"Nothing but what a friend ought to say," replied Zack, feeling that, in Mat's present condition, he had ventured a little too far. "I'm sorry, for your sake, that she never lived to have the presents you meant for her. There's no offense, I hope, in saying that much, or in asking (after what you yourself told Blyth) whether her death happened lately, or—"
"It happened afore ever you was born."
He gave this answer, which amazed Zack, in a curiously smothered, abstracted tone, as if he were talking to himself; laying aside the rifle suddenly as he spoke, sitting down by the table again, and resting his head on his hand, Young Thorpe took a chair near him, but wisely refrained from saying anything just at that moment. Silence seemed to favor the change that was taking place for the better in Mat's temper. He looked up, after awhile, and regarded Zack with a rough wistfulness and anxiety working in his swarthy face.
"I like you, Zack," he said, laying one hand on the lad's arm and mechanically stroking down the cloth of his sleeve. "I like you. Don't let us two part company. Let's always pull together as brotherly and pleasant as we can." He paused. His hand tightened round young Thorpe's arm; and the hot, dry, tearless look in his eyes began to soften as he added, "I take it kind in you, Zack, saying you were sorry for her just now. She died afore ever you was born." His hand relaxed its grasp: and when he had repeated those last words, he turned a little away, and said no more.
Astonishment and curiosity impelled young Thorpe to hazard another question.
"Was she a sweetheart of yours?" he asked, unconsciously sinking his voice to a whisper, "or a relation, or—"
"Kin to me. Kin to me," said Mat quickly, yet not impatiently; reaching out his hand again to Zack's arm, but without looking up.
"Was she your mother?"
"No."
"Sister?"
"Yes."
For a minute or two Zack was silent after this answer. As soon as he began to speak again, his companion shook his arm—a little impatiently, this time—and stopped him.
"Drop it," said Mat peremptorily. "Don't let's talk no more, my head—"
"Anything wrong with your head?" asked Zack.
Mat rose to his feet again. A change began to appear in his face. The flash that had tinged it from the first, deepened palpably, and spread up to the very rim of his black skull-cap. A confusion and dimness seemed to be stealing over his eyes, a thickness and heaviness to be impeding his articulation when he spoke again.
"I've overdone it with the brandy," he said, "my head's getting hot under the place where they scalped me. Give me holt of my hat, and show me a light, Zack. I can't stop indoors no longer. Don't talk! Let me out of the house at once."