“If you don’t mind, it will please me for you to call me by the name I have registered under—Burton,” said Walter, in a low tone. “You know I do not care about being recognized here, and I depend on this beard to serve as a disguise.”
“Rather careless of you, to say the least,” declared Swift. “But I’m perfectly willing to call you any old thing you like. It doesn’t matter to me, and I’m your friend, you know.”
“Oh, I am—your particular friend. How is your arm this morning, old man?”
“Well, you may be sure it doesn’t feel pleasant.”
“Sorry. But you were lucky to get off so easy.”
“You have a way of bumping into hard luck, you know,” said Swift, taking a seat and lighting a cigar before offering one to his companion. “Have a smoke?”
“That little affair which obliterated you from the map of the United States was very unfortunate,” pursued the soldier, without guarding his voice in the least.
“What are you trying to do, man?” demanded Walter, a flush in his cheeks and his eyes flashing. “Are you determined to tell these people here who I am?”
“Not at all. Just carelessness of me. But it would be a bad thing if it got out, wouldn’t it? You’d be nabbed and have to stand trial. They’d be sure to convict you, and you’d get ten or twenty years. I say, Walt, old chum, you’re running a deuce of a risk coming here.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I know it well enough. But I’ve been hungry for a sight of the old places and of my father, sister, and friends. You don’t know what it is, Swift, to be an outcast, a man without a country. I don’t suppose I’d felt half so bad if I’d thought I might come back any time without fear of anything; but the knowledge of what was hanging over my head the moment I placed my foot on the soil of the United States made me wild to see the land in which I was born, my native land, the land I love!”
“Don’t believe I’d felt that way in your place. I’d felt that I didn’t care a rap for a country where I had been treated in such a shabby manner.”
“Did you ever read Edward Everett Hale’s wonderful story, ‘The Man Without a Country’?”
“Naw! I don’t read stories. They’re such rot!”
“Some are; some are not. The one I speak of seems to me the greatest story ever written, for I am much like the poor wretch in that story. He railed against his native land, cursed it, expressed a wish to never set foot on its shores again. As he was an officer in the regular army, this was regarded as treason. He was tried and condemned to eternal banishment from the United States. He had said that he wished never again to hear the name of his country, and in the decree of his punishment it was directed that never again should he hear it.