The Exiles and Other Stories | Page 7

the meet to-day?" asked Carroll.
The Tammany chieftain said no, that he did not ride--not after foxes, in
any event. "But I saw Mrs. Hornby and her sister coming back," he said.
"They had on those linen habits."
"Well, now, there's a woman who illustrates just what I have been
saying," continued Carroll. "You picked her out as a self-respecting,
nice-looking girl--and so she is--but she wouldn't like to have to tell all
she knows. No, they are all pretty much alike. They wear low-neck
frocks, and the men put on evening dress for dinner, and they ride after
foxes, and they drop in to five-o'clock tea, and they all play that they're
a lot of gilded saints, and it's one of the rules of the game that you must
believe in the next man, so that he will believe in you. I'm breaking the
rules myself now, because I say 'they' when I ought to say 'we.' We're
none of us here for our health, Holcombe, but it pleases us to pretend
we are. It's a sort of give and take. We all sit around at dinner-parties
and smile and chatter, and those English talk about the latest news from
'town,' and how they mean to run back for the season or the hunting.
But they know they don't dare go back, and they know that everybody
at the table knows it, and that the servants behind them know it. But it's

more easy that way. There's only a few of us here, and we've got to
hang together or we'd go crazy."
"That's so," said Meakim, approvingly. "It makes it more sociable."
"It's a funny place," continued Carroll. The wine had loosened his
tongue, and it was something to him to be able to talk to one of his own
people again, and to speak from their point of view, so that the man
who had gone through St. Paul's and Harvard with him would see it as
such a man should. "It's a funny place, because, in spite of the fact that
it's a prison, you grow to like it for its freedom. You can do things here
you can't do in New York, and pretty much everything goes there, or it
used to, where I hung out. But here you're just your own master, and
there's no law and no religion and no relations nor newspapers to poke
into what you do nor how you live. You can understand what I mean if
you've ever tried living in the West. I used to feel the same way the
year I was ranching in Texas. My family sent me out there to put me
out of temptation; but I concluded I'd rather drink myself to death on
good whiskey at Del's than on the stuff we got on the range, so I pulled
my freight and came East again. But while I was there I was a little
king. I was just as good as the next man, and he was no better than me.
And though the life was rough, and it was cold and lonely, there was
something in being your own boss that made you stick it out there
longer than anything else did. It was like this, Holcombe." Carroll half
rose from his chair and marked what he said with his finger. "Every
time I took a step and my gun bumped against my hip, I'd straighten up
and feel good and look for trouble. There was nobody to appeal to; it
was just between me and him, and no one else had any say about it.
Well, that's what it's like here. You see men come to Tangier on the run,
flying from detectives or husbands or bank directors, men who have
lived perfectly decent, commonplace lives up to the time they made
their one bad break--which," Carroll added, in polite parenthesis, with a
deprecatory wave of his hand toward Meakim and himself, "we are all
likely to do some time, aren't we?"
"Just so," said Meakim.
"Of course," assented the District Attorney.
"But as soon as he reaches this place, Holcombe," continued Carroll,
"he begins to show just how bad he is. It all comes out--all his
viciousness and rottenness and blackguardism. There is nothing to

shame it, and there is no one to blame him, and no one is in a position
to throw the first stone." Carroll dropped his voice and pulled his chair
forward with a glance over his shoulder. "One of those men you saw
riding in from the meet to-day. Now, he's a German officer, and he's
here for forging a note or cheating at cards or something quiet and
gentlemanly, nothing that shows him to be a brute or a beast. But last
week he had old