tent stood a dun limousine, with two black stars painted on its side, and with sidecars parked about. Within the tent sat the general. Now there is something about a major-general in uniform standing up to greet visitors, which rather fills the picture. Foster, Gaylord and Titmarsh envisaged only the general.
"Don't thank me," protested that gallant officer, tersely. "Thank Harrington, there! Thank 'Hellfire'? The general gestured to where at a table sat a man in the uniform of a colonel. He was the general's chief-of-staff; and beside him, as he had been beside him all day long, making suggestions, approving plans, directing officers who came and went, was the man in the business suit—still looking somewhat bedraggled—Henry Harrington. That's the man you owe your thanks to for getting us here as promptly as we did."
The committee stared. It had almost forgotten Henry Harrington. Titmarsh remembered having heard a rumor that this lesser Judas was out of jail and had been seen around; but this—this sight of him in relations of intimacy with the major-general; this revelation that it was to him the town was indebted for not missing even a single meal, for the lives of many of its babies, for so swift a reduction of its inevitable physical suffering—this was rather overwhelming to Titmarsh. To Foster and Gaylord it was rebuking. They stared stiffly—old memories rising.
"Well," glared the general, "why don't you thank him?"
Gaylord was a brusque man, but capable of some fineness of perception. He was considerably shaken; but Foster was angered, as well as totally confounded.
