The Price Of Cigars Struck Me As Especially
Pathetic, And I Commented On It.
The first officer gazed mournfully
at the blazing sunshine before him.
"I have not smoked a cigar in
two months," he said. My surging sympathy, and my terror at again
offending the haughty garrison, combated so fiercely that it was only
with a great effort that I produced a handful. "Will you have
these?" The other officer started in his saddle so violently that I
thought his horse had stumbled, but he also kept his eyes straight in
front. "Thank you, I will take one if I may - just one," said the
first officer. "Are you sure I am not robbing you?" They each took
one, but they refused to put the rest of the cigars in their pockets.
As the printed list stated that a dozen matches sold for $1.75, I
handed them a box of matches. Then a beautiful thing happened. They
lit the cigars and at the first taste of the smoke - and they were not
good cigars - an almost human expression of peace and good-will and
utter abandonment to joy spread over their yellow skins and cracked
lips and fever-lit eyes. The first man dropped his reins and put his
hands on his hips and threw back his head and shoulders and closed
his eyelids. I felt that I had intruded at a moment which should
have been left sacred. {5}
Another boy officer in stainless khaki and beautifully turned out,
polished and burnished and varnished, but with the same yellow skin
and sharpened cheek-bones and protruding teeth, a skeleton on horse-
back, rode slowly toward us down the hill.
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