I'll start after breakfast." He was glad when supper was over and he was back in his own cabin smoking his pipe.

It was almost with a feeling of shame that he took the golden hair from his wallet and held it once more so that it shone before his eyes in the firelight.
"You're crazy, Phil Steele," he assured himself.

"You're an unalloyed idiot.

What the deuce has Colonel Becker's wife got to do with you--even if she has golden hair and uses cream-tinted paper soaked in hyacinth?
Confound it--there!" and he released the shining hair from his fingers so that the air currents sent it floating back into the deeper gloom of the cabin.
It was midnight before he went to bed.

He was up with the first cold gray of dawn.