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Aintree laughed angrily.

“Drink has no hold on me,” he protested. “It affects me as much as the lights and the music affect a girl at her first dance, and no more. But, if you ask me to stop–“

“I do not!” said the girl. “If you stop, you’ll stop not because I have any influence over you, but because you don’t need my influence. If it’s wrong, if it’s hurting you, if it’s taking away your usefulness and your power for good, that’s why you’ll stop. Not because a girl begs you. Or you’re not the man I think you.”

Aintree retorted warmly. “I’m enough of a man for this,” he protested: “I’m enough of a man not to confess I can’t drink without making a beast of myself. It’s easy not to drink at all. But to stop altogether is a confession of weakness. I’d look on my doing that as cowardly. I give you my word–not that I’ll swear off, that I’ll never do–but I promise you you’ll have no further reason to be what you call humiliated, or ashamed. You have my word for it.”

A week later Aintree rode his pony into a railway cutting and rolled with it to the tracks below, and, if at the time he had not been extremely drunk, would have been killed. The pony, being quite sober, broke a leg and was destroyed.

When word of this came to Helen she was too sick at heart to see Aintree, and by others it was made known to him that on the first steamer Miss Scott would return North. Aintree knew why she was going, knew she had lost faith and patience, knew the woman he loved had broken with him and put him out of her life. Appalled at this calamity, he proceeded to get drunk in earnest.

The night was very hot and the humidity very heavy, and at Las Palmas inside the bungalow that served as a police-station the lamps on either side of the lieutenant’s desk burned like tiny furnaces. Between them, panting in the moist heat and with the sweat from his forehead and hand dripping upon an otherwise immaculate report, sat Standish. Two weeks before, the chief had made him one of his six lieutenants. With the force the promotion had been most popular.

Since his promotion Standish had been in charge of the police- station at Las Palmas and daily had seen Aintree as, on his way down the hill from the barracks to the railroad, the hero of Batangas passed the door of the station-house. Also, on the morning Aintree had jumped his horse over the embankment, Standish had seen him carried up the hill on a stretcher. At the sight the lieutenant of police had taken from his pocket a notebook, and on a flyleaf made a cross. On the flyleaf were many other dates and opposite each a cross. It was Aintree’s record and as the number of black crosses grew, the greater had grown the resentment of Standish, the more greatly it had increased his anger against the man who had put this affront upon the army, the greater became his desire to punish.

In police circles the night had been quiet, the cells in the yard were empty, the telephone at his elbow had remained silent, and Standish, alone in the station-house, had employed himself in cramming “Moss’s Manual for Subalterns.” He found it a fascinating exercise. The hope that soon he might himself be a subaltern always burned brightly, and to be prepared seemed to make the coming of that day more certain. It was ten o’clock and Las Palmas lay sunk in slumber, and after the down train which was now due had passed, there was nothing likely to disturb her slumber until at sunrise the great army of dirt-diggers with shrieks of whistles, with roars of dynamite, with the rumbling of dirt-trains and steam-shovels, again sprang to the attack. Down the hill, a hundred yards below Standish, the night train halted at the station, with creakings and groanings continued toward Colon, and again Las Palmas returned to sleep.