Chapter XV

Before night three more telegraph boys found Yates, and three more telegrams in sections helped to carpet the floor of the forest. The usually high spirits of the newspaper man went down and down under the repeated visitations. At last he did not even swear, which, in the case of Yates, always indicated extreme depression. As night drew on he feebly remarked to the professor that he was more tired than he had ever been in going through an election campaign. He went to his tent bunk early, in a state of such utter dejection that Renmark felt sorry for him, and tried ineffectually to cheer him up.

"If they would all come together," said Yates bitterly, "so that one comprehensive effort of malediction would include the lot and have it over, it wouldn't be so bad; but this constant dribbling in of messengers would wear out the patience of a saint."

As he sat in his shirt sleeves on the edge of his bunk Renmark said that things would look brighter in the morning--which was a safe remark to make, for the night was dark.

Yates sat silently, with his head in his hands, for some moments. At last he said slowly: "There is no one so obtuse as the thoroughly good man. It is not the messenger I am afraid of, after all. He is but the outward symptom of the inward trouble. What you are seeing is an example of the workings of conscience where you thought conscience was absent. The trouble with me is that I know the newspaper depends on me, and that it will be the first time I have failed. It is the newspaper man's instinct to be in the center of the fray. He yearns to scoop the opposition press. I will get a night's sleep if I can, and to-morrow, I know, I shall capitulate. I will hunt out General O'Neill, and interview him on the field of slaughter. I will telegraph pages. I will refurbish my military vocabulary, and speak of deploying and massing and throwing out advance guards, and that sort of thing. I will move detachments and advance brigades, and invent strategy. We will have desperate fighting in the columns of the Argus, whatever there is on the fields of Canada. But to a man who has seen real war this opéra-bouffe masquerade of fighting----I don't want to say anything harsh, but to me it is offensive."

He looked up with a wan smile at his partner, sitting on the bottom of an upturned pail, as he said this. Then he reached for his hip pocket and drew out a revolver, which he handed, butt-end forward, to the professor, who, not knowing his friend carried such an instrument, instinctively shrank from it.

"Here, Renny, take this weapon of devastation and soak it with the potatoes. If another messenger comes in on me to-night, I know I shall riddle him if I have this handy. My better judgment tells me he is innocent, and I don't want to shed the only blood that will be spilled during this awful campaign."

How long they had been asleep they did