"Out to there. Stand in this place when it becomes dark, looking east. Straight in front of us is east. The game is great fun, and very easy. Strike a match, and count to ten before you blow it out, and you shall not have done that three times before you shall see him answer."

"But oo's 'im?"

"He is my friend—out there upon the veld."

"Lor! but where'll you be? Didn't you say as I'd be talkin' to you? I don't 'arf fancy wot you calls the gyme, not if I 'ave to play it with a strynge bloke!"

The answer came, accompanied by a scraping, familiar sound.

The Slabberts was striking a match of the fizzling, spluttering, Swedish-made non-safety kind, known to W. Keyse and his circle by the familiar abbreviation of "stinkers."

"Voor den donder! Have I not told you I shall be there with him—after to-night!"

Her womanly tenderness quickened at the hint of coming separation. She clung fondly to his arm, and the match went out, extinguished by a maiden's sigh. He shook her roughly off, and struck another.

"I shall go away—ja—and here is the only way for you to reach me!"

As the fresh match glimmered blue, he held it at arm's length in front of him, counting silently up to ten, then blew it out, and set his heavy boot upon the faintly-glowing spark, and did the thing again.

Endeavouring not to breathe so as to be heard, W. Keyse flattened himself against the corrugated fence, and waited, looking ahead into the thick velvet darkness, sensing the faint human taint upon the tell-tale breeze, and counting with the Slabberts; and then, out in the blackness that concealed so much that was sinister, sprang into sudden life an answering bluish glimmer, and lasted for ten beats of the pulse, and went out as suddenly as though a human breath had blown upon it.

"Is that your pal?" she whispered.

"That is my pal now." He struck another match, and flared it, and screened it with his big hand, and showed the light again, and repeated the manoeuvre three times. "That is my pal now—and I have said to him 'No news to-night'; but to-morrow night and the night after, and so on for many nights to come, I shall be out there where he is, and after you have called me and I have answered, just as he has done, you will tell me what there is to tell. Can you spell your language?"

"Pretty middlin', Walty deer, though not as I could wish, owin' to me 'avin' to leave Board School in the Fif' Stannard when father sold up the 'ome in drink after mother went orf wiv the young man lodger. Some'ow, try all I could, I never ..."

"Hou jou smoel! With our Boer people, when men speak, the women listen; but you English ones chatter and chatter! Remember that this match-talk goes thus: For the letter A one flare, and hide the light as you saw me do just now. For B, two flares, and hide the light; for C, three, and hide; for D, four, and hide; and so on ... It is slow, of course, and matches will blow out when you do not want them to, and a cycle-lamp or a candle-lantern would be easier to deal with, but for the verdoemte patrols. Do you understand? Say now what I say, after me. For the letter A one flare and hide. For B ..."

He put her through the alphabet from end to end; she laboured faithfully, and pleased her taskmaster. He grunted approvingly.

"Zeer goed! See that you do not forget. And remember, you are to listen and watch, and tell me what you hear and see. If you are obedient, I will marry you—by-and-by."

He gave her a clumsy hug in earnest of endearments to come.

"But if you do not please me"—the grip of his heavy hand bruised her shoulder through the thin, flowery "blowse"—"I will punish you—yes, by the Lord! I will marry a fine Boer maiden who is the daughter of a landrost, and who has got much money and plenty of sheep. And you can give yourself to any dirty verdoemte schelm of an Engelschman you please, for I will have none of you! To-morrow you shall have a paper showing you how to tell me very many things in match-talk, and earn much money to buy presents for my nice little Boer vrouw. Alamachtig! what is this?"

"This" was the hard, cold, polished business-end of a condemned Martini poked violently out of the blackness into the Slabbertian thorax.

"Not in such a 'urry by 'arf, you perishin' Dopper," spluttered the ghastly little man in bandoliers behind the weapon. "Put up them dirty big 'ands o' yours, or, by Cripps! I'll let 'er off, you sneakin', match-talkin' spy!"

The arms of Slabberts soared as the tongue of Slabberts wagged in explanation.

"This is assault and battery, Meister, upon a peaceful burgher. You shall answer to your officer for it, I tell you slap. Voor den donder! Is not a young man to light his pipe as he talks to a young woman without being called spy by a verdoemte sentry! Tell him, Jannje, that is all I did do!"

W. Keyse felt a little awkward, and the rifle was uncommonly heavy. The Slabberts felt it tremble, and thought about taking his hands down and reaching for that Colts six-shooter he kept in his hip-pocket. But though the finger wobbled, it was at the trigger, and Walt was not fond of risks.

"Tell him, Jannje!" he spluttered once more.

She had not needed a second bidding.

As the domestic hen in defence of her chicken will give battle to the wilde-kat, so Emigration Jane, with ruffled plumage, blazing, defiant eyes, and shrill objurgations, couched in the vernacular most familiar to their object, hurled herself upon the enemy.

"You narsty little brute, you! To up and try an' murder my young man. With your jor about spies! Sauce! I'd perish you, I would, if I was 'im! Off the fyce o' the earth, an' charnce bein' 'ung for it! Take away that gun, you silly little imitation sojer—d' you 'eer?"

The weapon was extremely weighty. W. Keyse's arms ached frightfully. Perspiration trickled into his eyes from under the tilted smasher. He felt damp and small, and desperately at a loss. And—as though in malice—the moon looked out from behind a curtain of thick, dim vapour, as he said with a lordly air:

"You be off, young woman, and don't interfere!"

Gawd! she knew him in spite of the smasher hat. Her rage burst the flood-gates. She screeched:

"You!... It's you. 'Oo I done a good turn to—an' this is 'ow I gits it back?" She gasped. "Because you're arter one young woman wot wouldn't be seen dead in the syme street wi' you ..."

Pierced with the awful thought that the adored one might be listening, W. Keyse lifted up his voice.

"Sentry.... 'Ere!... Mister!" he cried despairingly, "You on the other side, can't you hear?"

In vain the call. The stout fellow-townsman of W. Keyse, comfortably propped in an angle of the opposite fence, the bulk of the Convent and the width of its garden and tennis-ground being between them, continued to sleep and snore peacefully and undisturbed.

Emigration Jane continued:

"Because that sly cat wiv the yeller 'air-plait won't 'ear o' you, you try to git a pore servant-gal's fancy bloke pinched! Yah, greedy! Boo! You plate-faced, erring-backed, s'rimp-eyed little silly, with your love-letters an' messages! Wait till I give 'er another o' your screevin'—that's all!"

"Patrol!" cried W. Keyse in a despairing whimper.

She advanced upon him closer and closer, lashing herself as she came, to frenzy. How often had W. Keyse seen it outside the big gaudy pubs in the Tottenham Court Road, and the Britannia, Camden Town! Perhaps the recollection staring, newly awakened, in the pale, moonlit eyes of the little perspiring Town Guardsman stung her to equal memory, and provoked the act. Who can tell? We may only know that she plucked the weapon of lower-class London from her hat, and jabbed at the pale face viciously, and heard the victim say "Owch!" as he winced, and knew herself, as her Slabberts gripped the rifle-barrel, and wrested it with iron strength from the failing hands of W. Keyse, the equal of those dauntless Boer women who killed men when it was necessary. But, oh! the 'orrible, 'ideous feeling of 'aving stuck something into live flesh! Sick and giddy, the heroine shut her eyes, seeing behind their lids wondrous phantasmagoria of coloured pyrotechny, rivalling the most marvellous triumphs of the magician Brock....



W. Keyse's beheld, at the moment when his weapon was wrenched from him, two long grey arms come out of the darkness and coil about the largely-looming form of Slabberts. Enveloped in the neutral-tinted tentacles of this mysterious embrace, the big Boer struggled impotently, and a quick, imperative voice said, between the thick pants of striving men:

"Get the gun from him, will you, and call up your picket. Don't fire; blow your whistle instead!"

"Pip-ip-ip-'r'r! Pip-ip-r'r!"

The long, shrill call brought armed men hurrying out of the darkness on the other side of the Cemetery, and considerably quickened the arrival of the visiting patrol.

"Communicating with persons outside the defences by flashlight signals. We can't shoot him for it just yet, but we can gaol him on suspicion," said the Commander of the picket. And Slabberts, with a stalwart escort of B.S.A. troopers, reluctantly moved off in the direction of the guard-house.

"Who was the fellow who helped you, do you know?" asked the officer who had ridden up with the patrol. "Threw him and sat on him until the picket came up, you say," he commented, on hearing W. Keyse's version of the story. "A tall man in civilian clothes, with a dark wideawake and short pointed beard! H'm!"

"Coming from the veld, apparently, and not from town," said the picket Commander. "Must have known the countersign, or the sentries out there would have stopped him. I—see!"

He looked at the patrol-officer, who coughed again. The moonlight was quite bright enough for the exchange of a wink. Then:

"Hold on, man, you're bleeding," said W. Keyse's Sergeant, an old Naval Brigade man. "How did ye get that 'ere nasty prod under the eye?"

W. Keyse put up his hand, and gingerly felt the place that hurt. His fingers were red when they came away.

"The young woman wot was with the Dutchman, she jabbed me with a 'at-pin, to git me to let 'im go."

"There's a blindin' vixen for you!" commented the Sergeant. "Two inch higher, and she'd have doused your light out. Where did she come from, d'ye know?"

"Have you any idea who she was?" asked the Commander of the picket.

W. Keyse shook his head.

"'Aven't the least idear, sir. Never sor 'er before in my natural!" he declared stoutly.

"Well, you'll know her again when you meet her—or she will you," said the patrol-officer, about to move on, when a deplorable figure came staggering into the circle, and the rider reined up his horse. "What's this? Hey, Johnny, where's your gun?"

It was W. Keyse's fellow-sentry from the opposite flank of the Convent.

"And time you turned up, I don't think," commented W. Keyse. "Didn't you 'ear me sing out to you just now?"

"Come, now, what were you up to?" the Sergeant pressed. "Better up an' own it if you've bin asleep on guard."

The eager faces crowded round. The object of interest and comment, not at all sympathetic or polite, was a stout, respectable tradesman, with a large, round, ghastly face, who saluted his officer with a trembling hand.

"I—I have been the victim of an outrage, sir!"

"Sorry to hear it; what's your name?"

"Brooker, sir," volunteered W. Keyse's Corporal. "The other sentry we put on with Keyse here."

"Mr. Brooker, sir, General Stores, Market Square," babbled the citizen.

"Well, Private Brooker, what have you to say?"

"I have been drugged or hypnotised, sir, and robbed of my gun while in a state of insensibility, sir—upon my honour as an Alderman and Magistrate of this borough! Swear me, sir, if you have any doubt of my veracity!" He flapped his hands like fins, and his bandolier heaved above a labouring bosom.

The Commander of the picket looked preternaturally grave.

"Very sorry, Private Brooker, but unless the Sergeant has brought his Testament along, you'll have to give your information in the ordinary way. So they drugged you or hypnotised you—or both, was it?—and took away your rifle. Of course you saw it done?"

"No, sir, I did not see it done. When I woke up ..."

"Ah, when you woke up! Please go on."

The crowding faces of B.S.A. men and Town Guardsmen were grinning now. The patrol-officer was rocking in his saddle.

"When I revived, sir, from the swoon or trance ..."

"Very good, Private Brooker; we'll hear the rest of that in the morning. Sergeant, relieve these sentries, and bring Private Keyse and the hypnotic subject before me in the morning. Make this man Brooker a prisoner at large for the present, and fall in the picket."

The Sergeant saluted. "Very good, sir."

The bubbling Brooker boiled over frothily as the sentries were changing.

"A prisoner! Good God! do they take me for a traitor? A Magistrate ... an Alderman, the President of the Gas Committee ..."

"I should 'ave guessed you to be that if I 'adn't 'eard it, sonny," said the Sergeant dryly, the implied sarcasm provoking a subdued guffaw. He added, as the visiting patrol rode on and the picket marched back to the Cemetery: "Can't relieve you of your rifle, because you 'aven't got 'er. What in 'Eaven's name are they goin' to do to you? Well, you'll find out to-morrow. Left face; quick march!"

Counting left-right, and keeping elbow-touch with the next man, W. Keyse got in a whisper:

"I say, Sergeant, am I in for it as well as Ole Bulgy Weskit? You might as well let me know and charnce it!"

The Sergeant answered with unfeeling indifference:

"Since you ask, I should say you was."

"That's a bit 'ard! Wot'll I git?"

"Ten to one, your skater."

"Wot is my skater?"

"Your Corporal's stripe, you suckin' innocent! Wot for? For takin' a Boer spy pris'ner—that's wot for!"

"Cripps!" said W. Keyse, enlightened, illuminated and glowing in the darkness. He added a moment later, in rather a depressed tone: "But it was 'im, the civilian bloke with the beard, 'oo downed the Dutchy, an' sat on 'im till the guard come up."

The Sergeant was ahead of the half-company, speaking to the officer in charge. It was the Corporal who answered, across the man who marched upon the left of W. Keyse:

"O' course it was. But you 'ad the Dopper fust, and," he cackled quietly, "the Colonel won't be jealous."

The eyes and mouth of W. Keyse became circular.

"The who?"

"The Colonel, didn't you 'ear me say?"

"That wasn't never ... 'im"?

"All right, since you know best. But him, for all that!"

"Great Jiminy Cripps!" gasped W. Keyse.



XXIII

You are to imagine Dawn, trailing weary-footed over the interminable plain, to find Gueldersdorp, lonely before, and before threatened, now isolated like some undaunted coral rock in mid-Pacific, crested with screaming sea-birds, girt with roaring breakers, set in the midst of waters haunted by myriads of hungry sharks. Ringed with silent menace, she squatted on her low hill, doggedly waiting the event.

It was known that on the previous day the telegraph wires north of Beaton had been cut, and this day was to sever the last link with Cape Town at Maripo, some forty miles south. The railway bridge that crossed the Olopo River might go next. Staat's Engineers had been busy there overnight. Rumour had it, Heaven knows how, that the armoured train that had been sent up from the Cape with two light guns of superseded pattern—a generous contribution towards the collection of obsolete engines now bristling from the sand-bagged ramparts—had been seized by a commando, with the officer and the men in charge. This was to be confirmed later by the arrival of an engine-driver minus five fingers and some faith in the omnipotence of British arms. But at the beginning of this chapter he was hiding in a sand-hole, chewing the cud of his experiences, in default of other pabulum, and did not get in before dark of the long blazing day.

Crowds gathered on the barely-reclaimed veld at the northern end of the town to see the Military Executive take over the Hospital. But that the streets were barricaded with waggons and every able-bodied male citizen carried a rifle, it might have been mistaken for an occasion of national rejoicing or civic festivity. The leaves of the pepper-trees fringing the thoroughfares and clumped in the Market Square rustled in the faint hot breeze. By-and-by they were to stand scorched and seared and naked under the iron hail that beat in blizzards upon them, and die in the noxious lyddite fumes dispersed by bursting shells.

The variegated crowd cheered as the Staff dismounted at the white-painted iron gates of the railed-in Hospital grounds. It was not the acclamation of admiration, it was the cheer expectant. They wanted to know what the Officer in Command was going to do? Intolerable suspense racked them. Wherever it was known that he would be, there they followed at this juncture—solid masses of humanity, bored with innumerable ear-holes, and enamelled with patient, glittering, expectant eyes. His own keen, kindly glance swept over them as he touched his grey felt hat in acknowledgment of their dubious greeting, that half-hearted but well-meant cheer. He read the mute question written upon all the faces. Part of his answer to the interrogation was standing in the Railway-yard, but they would have to wait a little while longer yet—just a little longer. He whistled his pleasant melodious little tune as the porter hurried to open the gates.

One pair of pale, rather ugly eyes in the crowd were illumined with pure hero-worship. "That's 'im," explained their owner, nudging a big man in shabby white drill, who was shouldering a deliberate way through the press.



"The Colonel—and ain't 'e a Regular Oner! Them along of 'im—with the red shoulder-straps and brown leather leggin's, they're cav'l'ry Orficers o' the Staff, they are. An' them others in khaki with puttees—syme as wot I've got on—they're the Medical Swells. Military Saw-boneses—twig? You can tell 'em, when you're near enough, by the bronze badges with a serpint climbin' up a stick inside a wreath, wot they 'ave on the fronts o' their caps an' on their jacket-collars, an' the instrument-cases wot they carries in their bres' pockets. I'm a bit in the know about these things, being a sort of Service man meself."

Thus delicately did W. Keyse invite comment. Splendid additions had certainly been made to the martial outfit of the previous day. The tweed Norfolk had been replaced by a khaki jacket, evidently second-hand, and obligingly taken in by the lady of the boarding-house. A Corporal's stripe, purchased from a trooper of the B.S.A., who, as the consequence of over-indulgence in liquor and language, had one to sell, had been sewn upon the sleeve. The original owner had charged an extra tikkie for doing it, and it burned the arm that bore it like a vaccination-pustule on the fifth day.

"Being a sort of Service man meself," repeated W. Keyse. He twitched the stripe carelessly into sight. "C'manding orficer marked me down for this to-day," he continued, with elaborate indifference, "along of a Favourable Mention in the Cap'n's Guard Report. Nothin' much—little turn-up with a 'ulking big Dutch bloke, 'oo turned out to be a spy."

In the act of feeling for the invisible moustache, he recognised the face under the Panama hat worn by the big neighbour in white drill, and blushes swamped his yellow freckles. The owner of that square, powerful face, no longer bloated and crimson, but pale and drawn, was the man who had stepped in to the rescue at the Dutchman's saloon-bar on the previous day, where Fate had stage-managed effects so badly that the heroic leading attitude of W. Keyse had perforce given place to the minor role of the juvenile walking-gentleman. "Watto!" he began. "It's you, Mister! I bin wantin' to say thank——" But a surge of the crowd flattened W. Keyse against the green-painted iron railings surrounding a municipal gum-tree, and the big man was lost to view. Perhaps it was as well that the acquaintance made under conditions remote from respectability should not be renewed. But W. Keyse would have preferred to thank the rescuer.

The taking over of the Hospital was accomplished in a moment, to the disappointment of the ceremony-loving Briton and the Colonial of British race, to say nothing of the Kaffirs and the Barala, who anticipated a big indaba. The little party of officers in khaki walked up the gravel-drive between the carefully-tended grass plats to the stoep where the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, with the matron, house-surgeon, secretary, and several prominent members of the Committee—including Alderman Brooker, puffy-cheeked and yellow-eyed for lack of a night's rest—waited. Military Authority saluted Civic Dignity, shook hands, and the thing was done. Inspection followed.

"The warr'ds, said ye?" The Chief Medical Officer, a tall raw-boned personage, very evidently hailed from North of the Tweed. "I'm obliged to ye, ma'am," he addressed the flustered matron, "but the warr'ds an' the contents o' the beds in them are no' to say of the firr'st importance—at least, whaur I'm concerr'ned. With your permeesion we'll tak' a look at the Operating Theatre, and overhaul the sterileezing plant, and the sanitary arrangements, and maybe, after a gliff at the kitchens, there would be a moment to spend in ganging through the warr'ds. Unless the Colonel would prefer to begin wi' them?" He turned a small, twinkling pair of blue eyes set in dry wrinkles upon his Chief.

"Not I, Major. This is your department. But I shall ask five minutes more grace in the interests of the friend I spoke of, Dr. Saxham; with whom I made an appointment at the half-hour."

"You're no' by any chance meaning the Saxham that wrote 'The Diseases of Civilisation,' are ye, Colonel? I mind a sentence in it that must have been a douse of cauld watter—toch! vitriol would be the better worr'd—in the faces o' some o' the dandy operators. 'Young men,' he ca'ed them, as if he was a greybeard himsel', 'young men who, led to take up Surgery by the houp o' gains an' notoriety, have given themselves nae time to learn its scienteefic principles—showy operators, who diagnose wi' the knife an' endeavour to dictate to Nature and no' to assist her.' And yet Saxham could daur! 'I shall prove that the gastric ulcer can be cured wi'out exceesion,' he said, or they say he said in the Lancet report o' the operation on the Grand Duke Waldimir—I cam' across a reprint o' it no' lang ago—when Sir Henry McGavell sent for him, wi' the sweat o' mortal terror soakin' his Gladstone collar. He cut a hole in the Duke's stomach, ye will understand, in front o' the ulcer, clipped off the smaller intesteene, spliced the twa together wi' a Collins button, and by a successful deveece o' plumbing—naething less—earned the eterr'nal gratitude o' the autocrat an' the everlastin' currses o' the Nihilists. All that, seven years ago, an' the thing is dune the day wi'oot a hair's-breadth difference. For why? Ye canna paint the lily, or improve upon perfection. Toch!... Colonel, that man would be worth the waitin' for, if he stood in your friend's shoes the day!"

"Rejoice then, Major, and be exceeding glad, for I believe this is the man who wrote the book and plugged—or was it plumbed—the potentate."

The Chief Medical Officer rubbed his hands. "I promise myself a crack or twa wi' him, then.... But how is it a busy chiel like that can get awa' from his private patients and his Hospital warr'ds in the London Winter Season Ahem! ahem!"

By the haste the Medical Officer developed in changing the conversation, it was plain that he had recalled the circumstances under which the "busy chiel" had turned his back upon the private patients and the Hospital wards. "Colonel," he went on, "I could be wishing this varry creeditable-appearing institution—judging from the ootside o't—were twice as big as it is, wi' maybe an Annexe or so to the back of that."

"My dear Major, I never knew you really satisfied and happy but once, and that was when we had fifty men down with dysentery and fever in a tin-roofed Railway goods-shed, and a hundred and seventy more under leaky canvas, and you were out of chlorodyne and quinine, and could get no milk."

"That goes to prove the eleementary difference between the male an' the female character. A man will no' keep on dithering for what he kens he canna' get. A woman, especially a young an' pretty——" He broke off to say: "Toch! will ye hark to Beauvayse! The very name of the sex sets that lad rampaging."

"Beautiful! I tell you, sir," the handsome, fair-haired young aide-de-camp was emphatically assuring that stout, rubicund personage, the Mayor, "the loveliest girl I ever saw in my life, or ever shall see—bar none! I saw her first on the Recreation Ground, the day a gang of Boer blackguards insulted some nuns who were in charge of a ladies' school, and to-day she passed with two other Sisters of Mercy, and I touched my hat to her as the Staff dismounted at the gate."

"Another rara avis, Beau?" the Colonel called across the intervening group of talkers. The group of khaki-clad figures separated, and turned first to the Chief, then to the bright-eyed, bright-faced enthusiast. White teeth flashed in tanned faces, chaff began:

"In love again, for the first and only time, Toby?"

"Since he lost his heart to Miss What's-her-name, that pretty 'Jollity' girl, with the double-barrelled repeating wink, and the postcard grin."

"Don't forget the velvet-voiced beauty of the dark, moonless night on the Cape Town Hotel verandah!"

"She turned out to be a Hottentot lady, didn't she?"

"Cavalry Problem No. 1. Put yourself in Lieutenant the Right Hon. the Lord Viscount Beauvayse's place, and give in detail the precautions you would have taken to insure the transport of your heart uninjured from the Staff Headquarters to the Hospital Gate. Show on the map the disposition of the enemy, whether desirous to enslave, or likely to be mashed...."

"She was neither," the crimson boy declared. "She was simply a lady, quiet and high-bred and simple enough to have been a Princess of the blood, or to look a fellow in the face and pass him by without the slightest idea—I'd swear to it—that she'd fairly taken his breath away."

"My dear Lord!" The Mayor took a great deal of comfort out of a title. "Attractive the young lady is, I certainly admit, and my wife is—I may say the word—in her praise. But you go one, or half a dozen, better than Mrs. Greening, who will be perfectly willing, I don't doubt, to introduce you, unless the Colonel entertains objections ..."

"To Staff flirtations? Regard 'em as inevitable, Mr. Mayor, like Indian prickly-heat, or fever here. And probably the best cure for the complaint in the present instance would be to meet the cause of it."

"Judge for yourself, Colonel; you've first-class long-distance eyesight." There was a ring of defiance in the boy's fresh voice. "You've seen her before, and it isn't the kind of face one forgets. Here they are ... here she is now, coming back, with the other ladies. The railing spoils one's view, but the gates are open, and in another moment you'll see her pass them."

The Chief moved to the front of the stoep where the Staff had congregated. Men quietly fell aside, making place for him, so that he stood with Beauvayse, in a clear half-circle of figures attired like his own, in Service browns and drabs and umbers, waiting until the three approaching feminine shapes should pass across the open space. One or two Staff monocles went up. The Chief Medical Officer removed and wiped his steel-rimmed eyeglasses before replacing them on his bony aquiline nose.

They came and passed—the white figure and the two black ones. Of these one was very tall, one short and dumpy—veiled and mantled, their hands hidden in their ample sleeves, they went by with their eyes upon the ground. But the girl with them—a slight, willowy creature in a creamy cambric dress, a wide hat of black transparent material, frilled and bowed, upon her dead-leaf coloured hair, and tied by wide strings of muslin under her delicate round chin—looked with innocent, candid interest at the group of men outside the Hospital. The tanned faces, the simple workman-like Service dress, setting off the well-knit, alert figures, the quiet, soldierly bearing, even the distant sound of the well-bred voices, pleased her, even as the whiff of cigars and Russian leather that the breeze brought down from the stoep struck some latent chord of subconscious memory, and brought a puzzled little frown between the delicately-drawn dark eyebrows arching over black-lashed golden hazel eyes. And cognisant of every fleeting change of expression in those lovely eyes, the taller of her two companions thought, with a stab of pain:

"Your father was that man's friend, and the comrade of others like him."

"Now, then!" challenged Beauvayse, as the three figures moved out of sight.

"The 'Girl With the Golden Eyes'?" said somebody.

"You wouldn't speak of her in the same breath with that brainless beast of Balzac's, hang it all!" expostulated the champion. He turned eagerly to the Colonel. "Now you've seen her, sir, would you?"

"Not exactly. And I'm bound to say, I regard your claim to the possession of good taste as completely established.... 'Ware the horse, there! Look out! look out!" His eyes had followed the tall figure of the Mother-Superior, moving with the superlative grace and ease that comes of perfect physical proportion, carrying the black nun's robes, wearing the flowing veil of the nun with the dignity of an ideal queen. And the next instant, his charger, held with some others by a mounted orderly before the gates, and rendered nervous by the pressure of the crowd, shied at the towering panache of imitation grass-made ostrich feathers trailing from the aged and crownless pot-hat worn by a headman of the Barala in holiday attire, jerked the bridle from the hand of the trooper, and backed, rearing, in the direction of the three women passing on the sidewalk. The other horses shied, frustrating the efforts of the orderly to catch the flying bridle, and the danger from the huge, towering brown body and dangling iron-shod hoofs was very real, seemed inevitable, when a man in white drill and wearing a Panama hat ran out of the crowd, sprang up and deftly caught the loose bridoon-rein, mastered the frightened beast, and dragged it back into the roadway, in time to avert harm.

"Cleverly done, but a close thing," the Chief said, as he turned away. "I wish I had had that fellow's chance!" was written in Beauvayse's face. To have won a look of gratitude from those wonderful black-fringed eyes, brought a flush of admiration into those white-rose cheeks, would have been worth while. The slight, tall, girlish figure in its dainty creamy draperies had passed out of sight now between its two black-robed guardians. And had not Luck, that mutable-minded deity, given the golden chance to a hulking stranger in white drill, his, Beauvayse's, might have been the hand to intervene in the matter of the Colonel's restive charger, and his the ears to receive Beauty's acknowledgments.

If he had known that her eyes had been too full of his own resplendent, virile, glowing young personality, to even see the man who had stepped in between her and possible danger! The most innocent girl will have her ideal of a lover and thrill at the imagined touch, and furnish the dumb image with a dream-voice that woos her in impossible, elaborate, impassioned sentences, very unlike the real utterances of Love when he comes. The blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, golden-locked St. Michael portrayed in celestial-martial splendour upon one of the panels of the triptych over the altar in the Convent chapel, had, as he bent stern young brows over the writhing demon with the vainly-enveloping snake-folds, something of the young soldier's look, it seemed to Lynette. Ridiculous and profane, Sister Cleophee or Sister Ruperta would have said, to liken a handsome, stupid, young lieutenant of Hussars to the immortal Captain of the Armies of Heaven.

But she knew another who would understand. There was no flaw in the perfect sympathy that maintained between Lynette and the Mother-Superior, though, certainly, since the Colonel's visit of the previous day, the Mother had seemed strangely preoccupied and sad.... Her good-night kiss, invariably so warm and tender, had been the merest brush of lips against the girl's soft cheek; her good-morning had been even more perfunctory; her eyes, those great maternal radiances, turned their light elsewhere. Unloved and neglected, the Convent's spoiled darling hugged her abandonment, weaving a very pretty, ineffably silly romance, in which a noble and beautiful young Hussar lover, suddenly appearing over the corrugated-iron fence of the tennis-ground, the foliage of its fringe of pepper-trees waving in the night-breeze, strode towards the slender white figure leaning from her chamber-casement, whispering, with outstretched hands, and eyes that gleamed through the darkness:

"Open the door! Do you hear, you Kid? Open the door!"



Her heart beat once, heavily, and seemed to stop. A cold breath seemed to blow upon the little silken hair-tendrils at the nape of her white neck, spreading a creeping, stiffening horror through her body, deadening sensation, paralysing every limb.

The close approach of any man, even the thought of such contact, turned her deadly faint, checked her pulses, stopped her breath. At picnics and parties and dances to which the Mayor's wife or the mothers of some of the pupils would invite or chaperon her, her vivid, delicate, fragile beauty would draw, first men's eyes, and then their owners, not all unhandsome or undesirable; while showier girls looked in vain for partners or companions. The little triumph, the consciousness of being admired and sought after, would quicken Lynette's pulses, and heighten the radiance of her eyes, and lend animation to her girlish chatter and gaiety to her laughter—at first. Then some over-bold advance, some hot look or whispered word, would bring quick recollection leaping into the lovely eyes, and drive the vivid colour from the virginal transparent face, and stamp the smiling mouth into pale, breathless lines of Fear. That night in the tavern on the veld had branded a child with premature knowledge of the ferocious, ravening, devouring Beast that lies in Man concealed. Again she felt the scorching breath of lust upon her; she quailed under the intolerable touch; she shook like a reed in the brutal hands of the evil, dominating power that would brook no resistance and knew no mercy. The horrible obsession came upon her now, all the stronger for those moments of forgetfulness:

"Clang—clang—clang!"

The little Irish novice had rung the chapel bell for Sext and None. She could hear, from the nuns' end of the big rambling, two-storied house, the rustling habits sweeping along the passage. She hurried to the door, and tore it open, frantically as though that ravening breath had been hot upon her neck, saw the dear black figure of the Mother sweeping towards her, and rushed into the arms that were held out, hiding from that burning, scorching, hideous memory in the bosom that dead Richard Mildare had turned from in his blindness.

Just as Beauvayse, stimulated by the recollection of the Mayor's promise to introduce him to the loveliest girl he had ever seen in his life, or ever should see, mentally registered a vow that he would keep the old buffer up to that, by listening to his interminable hunting-stories, and laughing at his venerable jokes, to tears if necessary. Love, like War, sharpened a fellow's faculties....

"It's rum to reflect," Beauvayse said, conscious of perpetrating an epigram, "that from time immemorial the fellow who wants to make up to a young woman has always had to begin by getting round an old man!"

He looked round for the old man, whom the title would have estranged for ever. He had buttonholed the Chief, and was gassing away—joy!—upon the very subject.

"I fancy the ladies of the Convent, who occasionally visit the Hospital, were coming in at this gate. The short nun, I noticed, had a little basket in her hand. Probably they went round to the side entrance, seeing the—ha, ha!—the stoep garrisoned by Her Majesty's Imperial Forces. Certainly.... Without doubt. We respect the Mother-Superior highly. A most gifted, most estimable person in every way, if rather stern and reserved.... Unapproachable, my wife calls her. But Miss Mildare, her ward——"



XXIV

"Miss Mildare!"

The Chief's keen eyes had lightened suddenly. The whole face had darkened and narrowed, and the clipped brown moustache lost its smiling curve, and straightened into a hard line.

"Miss Mildare?"

"Why, yes, that is her name.... An orphan, I have heard, and with no living relatives. But she seems happy enough at the Convent, judging by what Mrs. Greening says."

The hearer experienced a momentary feeling of relief and of anger—relief to think that dead Dick Mildare's daughter should have found refuge in such a woman's heart; anger that the woman should have concealed from him the girl's identity, knowing her the object of his own anxious search.

Then he understood. His anger died as suddenly as it had been kindled. He recalled something that he had seen when the rearing horse had inclined perilously towards the footway—that protecting maternal gesture, that swift interposition of the tall, active, black-robed figure between the white-clad, flower-faced, girlish creature and those threatening iron-shod hoofs....

"She loves the girl—Dick Mildare's daughter by the treacherous friend who stole him from her. Is there a doubt? With poor little Lady Lucy Hawting's willowy figure and the same nymph-like droop of the little head, with its rich twists and coils of dead-leaf-coloured hair, shaded by the big black hat. That woman has taken her to her heart, however she came by her; the parting would be agony, stern, proud, tender creature that she is! I suppose she will be doing thundering penance for not having told me, a fellow who simply walked into the place and assegaied her with my death-news. Here's a marrowy bone of gossip Lady Hannah shall never crack. And yet I wouldn't swear there's not an angel husked inside that dried-up little chrysalis. For God made all women, though He only turned out a few of 'em perfect, and some only just a little better than the ruck."

He roused himself from the brown study that brought into relief many lurking lines and furrows in the thin, keen face, as the Chief Medical Officer, fixing him through suspicious eyeglasses, demanded:

"Ye got your full allowance o' sleep last nicht?"

He nodded.

"Thanks to a Cockney babe in bandoliers, who was born not only with eyes and ears, like other infants, but with the capacity for using 'em."

"Ay. It's remarr'kable how many men will daudle complacently through life, from the cradle to the grave, wi'out the remotest consciousness that they're practically blind and no better than deaf, as far as regards real seeing and hearing. But who's your prodeegy?"

"One of Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. They put him on at the Convent with another sentry, their first experience of a night on guard. By not being in a hurry to challenge, and keeping his ears open while a conversation of the confidentially-affectionate kind was going on between a Dutchman—a fellow employed in the booking-office at the railway, on whom I've had my eye for some little time past—and his sweetheart, my townie found out for himself something that most of us knew before, and something else that we wanted to know particularly badly...."

"Namely?"

"For one thing, that the town is a hotbed of spies, and that our friends in laager outside are nightly communicated with by means of flash-signals."

"And that's an indeesputable fact. Toch!" No other combination of letters may convey the guttural, "Have I no' seen the lamps at warr'k mysel', after darr'k, at the end o' the roads that debouch upon the veld! The Dutchman would be able to plead precedent, I'm thinking."

"He will have plenty of time to think where he is at present. When the sentry interfered he was instructing the young woman in a simple but effective code of match-flare signals, by means of which she was to communicate with him when he had cleared out. And he had announced his intention of doing that without delay."

"An' skipping to his freends upo' the Borr'der.... Toch!" The network of wrinkles tightened about the sharp little blue-grey eyes of the Chief Medical Officer. "That would gie a thochtfu' man a kind o' notion that a reese in the temperature may be expectit shortly. An' so you—slept soundly on the strength o' many wakeful nichts to come? Ay, that would be the kind o' information ye were badly wanting!"

"You're wrong, Major. The bit of information was this—from the spy to his friends outside: 'No—news—to-night.'" The keen hazel eyes conveyed something into the Northern blue ones that was not said in words: "'No news to-night.' And the sender of that message was a railway man!"

The wiry hairs of the Chief Medical Officer's red moustache bristled like a cat's.

"Toch! Colonel, you will have reason to be considering me dull in the uptake, but I see through the mud wall now. And so the knowledge that ye have no equal at hiding your deeds o' darkness even in the licht o' the railway-yard was as good to ye as Daffy's Elixir. And when micht we reckon on getting notification from what I may presume to ca' your double surpreese-packet?"

He looked at his watch—a well-used Waterbury, worn upon the silvered steel lip-strap of a cavalry bridle, and said:

"Ten o'clock. At a quarter past eleven I think we may count upon something. The driver of Engine 123 has given me the word of an Irishman from County Kildare; and the stoker, a Cardiff man, and the guard, who hails from Shoreditch, are quite as keen as Kildare."

"You're sending the stuff up North?"

"In the direction of the stretch of railway-line they're busy wrecking, in the hope that it may come in useful."

"Weel, I will gie ye the guid wish that the affair may go off exactly as ye are hoping."

"Thanks, Major! You could hardly word the sentence more happily."

They exchanged a laugh as the Mayor bustled up, rubicund, important, and with a Member of the Committee to introduce.

"Colonel, you'll permit me to present Alderman Brooker, one of our most energetic and valued townsmen, President of the Gas Committee, and an Assistant Borough Magistrate. One of Major Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. Was on sentry-go last night not far from here, and had a most extraordinary experience. Worth your hearing, if you can spare time to listen to my friend's account of it."

"With pleasure, Mr. Mayor."

Brooker, a stout and flabby man, with pouches under biliously tinged eyes, bowed and broke into a violent perspiration, not wholly due to the shiny black frock-coat suit of broadcloth donned for the occasion.

"Sir, I humbly venture to submit that I have been the victim of a conspiracy!"

"Indeed? Step this way, Mr. Brooker."

Brooker, soothed by the courteous affability of the reception, his sense of importance magnified by being led aside, apart from the others, into the official privacy of the stoep-corner, began to be eloquent. He knew, he said, that the story he had to relate would appear almost incredible, but a soldier, a diplomat, a master of strategy, such as the personage to whom he now addressed himself, would understand—none better—how to unravel the tangled web, and follow up the clue to its ending in a den of secret, black, and midnight conspiracy. A blob of foam appeared upon his under-lip. He waved his hands, thick, short-fingered, clammy members....

"My story is as follows, sir...."

"I shall have pleasure in listening to it, Mr. Brooker, on condition that you will do me first the favour of listening to a story of mine?"

Deferred Brooker protested willingness.

"Last night, Mr. Brooker, at about eleven-thirty to a quarter to twelve, I was returning from a little tour of inspection"—the slight riding sjambok the Chief carried pointed over the veld to the northward—"out there, when, passing the south angle of the enclosure of the Convent, where, by my special orders, a double sentry of the Town Guard had been posted, I heard a sound that I will endeavour to reproduce:

"Gr'rumph! Honk'k! Gr'rumph!"

Brooker bounded in his Oxford shoes.

The face upon which he glued his bulging eyes was grave to sternness. He stuttered, interrogated by the judicial glance:

"It—it sounds something like a snore."

"It was a snore, Mr. Brooker, and it proceeded from one of the sentries upon guard."

"Sir ... I ... I can expl——"

"Oblige me by not interrupting, Mr. Brooker. This sentry sat upon a short post, his back fitted comfortably into an angle of the Convent fence, his head thrown back, and his mouth wide open. From it, or from the organ immediately above, the snore proceeded. He was having a capital night's rest—in the Service of his Country. And as I halted in front of him, fixing upon him a gaze which was coldly observant, he shivered and ceased to snore, and said":—the wretched Brooker heard his own voice, rendered with marvellous fidelity, speaking in the muffled tone of the sleeper—"'Annie, it's damned cold to-night; and you've got all the blanket.'"

"Sir ... sir!" The stricken Brooker babbled hideously.... "Colonel ... for mercy's sake!..."

"I could not oblige the gentleman with a blanket, Mr. Brooker, but I relieved him of his rifle and left him, to tell his picket a cock-and-bull story of having been drugged and hypnotised by Boer spies. And—I will overlook it upon the present occasion, but in War-time, Mr. Brooker, men have been shot for less. I think I need not detain you further. Your rifle has been sent to your headquarters—with my card and an explanation. One word more, Mr. Brooker——"

Brooker, grey, streaky, and desperately wretched, was blind to the laughter brimming the keen hazel eyes.

"I am entrusted by the Imperial Government with the preservation of Public Morality in Gueldersdorp, as well as with the maintenance of the Public Safety—and I should be glad of an assurance from you that Mrs. Brooker's Christian name is really Annie?"

"I—I swear it, Colonel!"

Brooker fled, leaving the preserver of public morality to have his laugh out before he rejoined the Staff, glancing at the Waterbury on the short steel chain. Half-past ten. Would the Dop Doctor turn up to appointment, or had the battle with habit and the deadly craving born of indulgence ended in defeat? As his eyes moved from the dial, they lighted upon the man:

"Clothed and in his right mind...."

His own words of the night before recurred to memory as he came forwards with his long, light step, greeting the new-comer with the easy, cordial grace of high-breeding.

"Ah, Dr. Saxham, obliged to you for being punctual. Let me introduce you to Major Lord Henry Leighbury, D.S.O., Grenadier Guards, our D.A.A.G. Dr. Saxham, Colonel Ware, Baraland Rifles, and Sir George Wendysh, Wessex Regiment, commanding the Irregular Horse; Captain Bingham Wrynche, Royal Bay Dragoons, my senior aide-de-camp, and his junior, Lieutenant Lord Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars. And Dr. Saxham, Major Taggart, R.A.M.C., our Chief Medical Officer."

He watched the man keenly as he made the introductions, saying to himself that this was better than he had hoped. The ragged black moustache had been shaved away; the frayed but spotless suit of white drill fitted the heavy-shouldered, thin-flanked, muscular figure perfectly; the faded blue flannel shirt, with the white double collar and narrow black tie; the shabby black kamarband about his waist, the black-ribboned Panama, maintaining respectability in extremest old age, as that expensive but lasting headgear is wont to do, possessed, as worn by the Dop Doctor, a certain cachet of style. His slight, curt, almost frowning salutations displayed a well-graduated recognition of the official status of each individual to whom he was made known, betokening the man accustomed to move in circles where such knowledge and the application of it was indispensable, and who knew, too, that slight from him would have given chagrin. But another moment, and the junior Medical Officer, a black-avised little Irishman from County Meath, had gripped him by both hands, and was exclaiming in his juicy brogue, real delight beaming in his round, rosy face:

"Saxham! Saxham of St. Stephens, and the grand ould days! Deny me now, to my face. Say, 'Tom McFadyen, I don't know you,' if you dare."

The blue eyes shone out vivid gentian-colour in the kindly smile that illumined them, the stern lips parted in a laugh that showed the sound white closely-set teeth.

"Tom McFadyen, I do know you. But if you offer to pay me that cab-fare you owe me, I shall say I'm wrong, and that it's another man."

"Hould your tongue, jewel," drolled the little junior, who delighted in exaggerating the brogue that tripped naturally off his Irish tongue. "Don't be after giving me away to the Chief and the Senior that believe me, by me own account, to be descended from Ollamh Fodla, that was King of Tara, and owned the cow-grazing from Trim to Athboy, and ate boiled turnips off shields of gold before potatoes were invented, when the bog-oaks were growing as acorns on the tree. And as to the cab-fare, sure I hailed the hansom out of politeness to your honour's glory, the day that saw me going off to the Army Medical School at Netley, wid all my worldly belongin's in wan ould hat-box and the half of a carpet-bag. Wirra, wirra! but it's some folks have luck, says I, as the train took me out av' Waterloo in a third-class smoker, while you were left on the platform sheddin' half-crowns out av every pore for the newspaper boys an' porters to pick up, and smilin' like a baby dhramin' av the bottle. You'd passed your exam in Anatomy wid wan hand held behind you an' a glove on the other, you'd got your London University Scholarship in Physiology, and you'd fallen head over ears in love with the prettiest and sweetest girl that ever wore out shoe-leather. You wrote to me two years later to say you'd been appointed an in-surgeon on the Junior Staff, an' that you were engaged to be married. But divil the taste of weddin'-cake did I ever get off you. What——"

The little Irishman, thoughtlessly rattling on, pulled up in an instant, seeing the ghastly unmistakable change upon the other's face. He remembered the grim black reason for the change in Saxham, and for once, his habitual tact deserted him. His rosy gills purpled, even as had the Mayor's on the Dop Doctor's entrance. His eyes winced under the heavy petrifying, unseeing stare of Saxham's blue ones....

"Sorry to stem the flood of your reminiscences, McFadyen, but we're going to overhaul the Hospital now."

It was the voice of the visitor who had come to the Harris Street house on the previous night, the tall, loosely-built, closely-knit figure in the easily fitting Service-dress that now stepped across the gulf that had suddenly opened between the two old friends, and laid a hand in pleasant, familiar fashion upon Saxham's heavy, rather bowed shoulders. But for that scholar's stoop they would have been of equal height. He went on: "You will be able to give us points, Saxham, where they will be needed most. Can't expect Colonial institutions, even at the best, to keep abreast of London."

The blue eyes met his almost defiantly.

"As I think I remember telling you, sir, it is five years since I saw London."

"Well, I don't blame you for taking a long holiday while it was procurable. There are a few of us who would benefit by a gallop without the halter, eh, Taggart?"

Saxham would not stoop even to benefit indirectly by the shrewd, kindly tact. He drew himself to his full height, and the words were spoken with such ringing clearness that they arrested the attention of every man present.

"My holiday was compulsory. I underwent—innocently—a legal prosecution for malpractice. The Crown Jury decided in my favour, but my West End connection was ruined. I resigned my Hospital and other appointments, and left England."

"Ay!" It was the Chief Medical Officer's broad Scots tongue that droned out the bagpipe note. "Weel, Doctor, it's an ill wind blaws naebody guid, and ye canna expect Captain McFadyen or mysel' to sympatheese overmuch wi' the West End for a loss that is our gain. And, Colonel, it's in my memory that ye had set your mind on beginnin' wi' the Operating Theatre?..."



XXV

The chart-nurse looked in to say that the Medical officers of the Garrison Staff were making the rounds, and was stricken to the soul by the discovery that the Reverend Julius Fraithorn had had no breakfast. Occupying a small, single-cotted, electric-bell-less room in the outlying ward—brick-lined and corrugated-iron-built like the greater building, and reserved for infectious cases—the Reverend Julius might have been said to be marooned, had not his dark-eyed, transparent, wasted young face created such hot competition among the nurses for the privilege of attending on him, that he had frequently received breakfast and dinner in duplicate, and once three teas. Some of the probationers, reared in the outer darkness of Dissent, knew no better than to term him "the minister." To the matron, who was High Church, he existed as "Father Fraithorn." Julius is hardly complete to the reader without an intimation that he very dearly loved to be dubbed "Father." The matron had never failed in this.

A letter from Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Margaret's, lay under the bony hand—a mere bunch of fleshless fingers, in which the skin-covered stick that had been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to say that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest Home at Cookham-on-Thames, he has started his Friday evening Confirmation classes for young costermongers in Little Schoolhouse Court, and obtained a record attendance by the simple plan of rewarding punctual attendance and ultimate mastery gained over the Catechism and Athanasian Creed with pairs of trousers. Julius had shaken his head over the trousers, knowing that the first walk taken by the garments in company with the winners would be as far as the pop-shop. But lying there in the clean-smelling, airy Hospital ward, he yearned with a mighty yearning for the stuffy West-Central classroom, and the rowdy crew of London roughs hulking and hustling on the benches, learning per medium of "the dodger," that one's duty to one's neighbour was not to abuse him foully without cause, to refrain one's hands from pocket-picking, shop-raiding, hustling, and jellying heads with brass-buckled belts or iron knuckle-dusters, and not to get drunk before Saturday night.

He had come out to South Africa upon the advice of physicians—honestly-meaning wiseacres—ignorant of the shifts, the fatigues, the inevitable exertions and privations that the panting, tottering invalid must inevitably undergo, in company with the hale traveller and the sound emigrant; the rough, protracted journeys, the neglect and discomfort of the inns and taverns and boarding-houses, where Kaffirs are the servants, and dirt and discomfort reign. He bore them because he must, and struggled on, learning by painful experience that fever-patches are best avoided, and finding out what dust-winds mean to the man who has got sick lungs, and sometimes thinking he was getting better, and would be one day able to go back to the Clergy House, and take up his mission in the West and West-Central districts, and begin work again.

Now, lying panting on his pillows, raised high by the light chair slipped in behind them, hospital-fashion, he looked beyond the whitewashed walls northwards, to grimy London. He dreamed, while the chart-nurse was still apologising about the forgotten breakfast, of the High Ritual in the sacred place, and the solemn joy of the vested celebrant of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The incense rose in clouds to the gilded, diapered roof, the organ pealed ... then the ward seemed to fill with men in khaki Service dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of quiet movements and well-bred gestures, obviously stamped with the cachet of authority. Upright, alert, well-knit, and strong, the visitors exhaled the compound fragrance of healthy virility, clean linen, and excellent cigars; and the poor sufferer yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing about his bed, and thought of that resting-place even narrower, in which his wasted body must soon lie. And then he mentally smote his breast and repented. What was he, the unworthy servant of Heaven, that he should dare to oppose the Holy Will?

"Weel now, and how are we the day?" said the Chief Medical Officer, presented by the Resident Surgeon to the occupant of the bed. He read approaching death in the sunken face against the pillows, and in the feeble pulse as he touched the skeleton wrist, and the Resident Surgeon, catching the Scotsman's eye, shook his head slightly, imparting information that was not needed.

"It is not in my power, I am afraid, sir, to return you the conventional answer," said Julius Fraithorn. "To be plain and brief, I am suffering from tuberculous lung-disease, and I am advised that I have not many days to live."

He smiled gratefully at the Resident Surgeon.

"Everything that can be done for me here is done. I cannot be too thankful. But I should have liked—I should have wished to have been spared to return to England, if not to live a little longer among my friends, at least to ..." He broke off panting, and his rattling breaths seemed to shake him. He sounded like Indian corn shaken in a gunny-bag; he wheezed like the mildewed harmonium in the Hospital chapel, on which he had once tried to play. When he had spoken, his voice had had the flat, deadly softness of the exhausted phthisical sufferer's. When he had moved he had suffered torture: the shoulder-blades and hip-bones had pierced the wasted muscular tissues and projected through the skin.

"I can't!" he gasped out. "You see——"

A dizziness of deadly weakness seized him. His soft, muffled voice trailed away into a whisper, blue shadows gathered about his large, mobile, sensitive mouth, much like that of Keats as shown in the Death Cast, and his head fell back upon the pillows. Julius had fainted.

"Poor beggar!" said a large, pink man, wearing the red shoulder-straps and brown-leather leggings of the Staff, to another, a fair, handsome, young giant who leaned against the opposite door-post, as the chart-nurse hurried to take away the pillows, and lay the patient flat, and the shorter of the two medical officers dropped brandy from a flask into a glass with water in it, while the tall Scot, his finger on the pulse, stooped over the pale figure on the bed;

"No doubt about his next address being the Cemetery. Should grouse myself if I was in his shoes—or bed-socks would be the proper word—what?"

Beauvayse agreed. "He looks like a chap I saw once get into a coffin at the Cabaret de l'Enfer—that shady restaurant place in the Boulevard de Clichy. When they turned on the lights ..." He shrugged. "The women of the party thought it simply ripping. I wanted to be sick."

Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea during a similar experience. "But women'll stand anything," he said, "particularly if they've been told it's chic. My own part, I can stand any amount of dead men—healthy dead men, don't you know? But—give you my word—a cadaverous spectacle like that poor chap, bones stickin' out of his hide, and breathin' as if he was stuffed with dry shavin's, or husks like the Prodigal Son, gives me the downright horrors!"

Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts with solid shoulders, until the C.M.O., turning his head, addressed them brusquely, curtly:

"Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beauvayse to the passage, myself and my colleagues here would be the better obliged to ye."

"Pleasure!" They removed, with a simultaneous clink of scabbards and a ring of spurred heels on the tiled pavement.

The Colonel remained, making those about the bed a group of five. The chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of dismissal, a rigid statue of capped and aproned discipline, upright in the corner.

"Phew!" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and produced a cigar-case. "Well out of that, my boy. All jumps this morning; wouldn't take the odds you're not as bad?"

"Rather!" Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's attention, with a look, to the strong young hand that held a choice Havana just accepted from the offered case. "Shaky, isn't it? and yet I didn't punish the champagne much last night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels before riding a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a raw morning. Not that I've been in anything but a couple of Punitive Expeditions—from Peshawar, under Wilks-Dayrell, splitting up some North-West Frontier tribes that had lumped themselves together against British Authority—up to now. But I'm looking out for the chance of something better worth having, like you and all the rest of us. Trouble you for a light!"

"By the Living Tinker, and that's the fourth! Where d'you think I'd give a cool fifty to be this minute? Not cooling my heels in a brick-paved passage while a pack of doctors are swoppin' dog-Latin over the body of a moribund young parson, but on the roof of the Staff Quarters, lookin' North, with my eyes glued to the binoculars and my ears pricked for—you know what!"

Beauvayse groaned. "Isn't that what I'm suffering for? And the Chief must be ten times worse. How he keeps his countenance—demure as my grandmother's cat lappin' cream.... I say, the Transvaal Dutch; they call themselves the true Children of Israel, don't they? Well, which did Moses and his little gang come across first in the Desert, the Pillar of Cloud, or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of railway-trucks containin' the raw material for a sky-journey, only waitin' till Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in among the dynamite? It makes me feel good all over, as the American women say, when I think of it." He smiled like a mischievous young archangel, masquerading in Service kit.

Within the room the fainting man was coming back to consciousness, his dry, rattling breaths bearing out Captain Bingo Wrynche's similitude regarding husks and shavings, rings of blue fire swimming before his darkened vision, and a dull roaring in his ears.... The Royal Army Medical Corps wrought over him; the nurse lent a deft helping hand; the Resident Surgeon talked eagerly to the Colonel; and he, lending ear, scarcely heard the reiterated, stereotyped parrot-phrases, so taken up was his attention with the man in shabby white drill clothes, who leaned over the foot of the bed, his square face set into an expressionless mask, his gentian-blue, oddly vivid eyes fixed upon the wasted, waxy-yellow face of the sick man, his head bent, as he listened with profound, absorbed attention to the husky, rattling, laboured breaths.

Suddenly he straightened himself and spoke, addressing himself to the Resident Surgeon.

"The patient has told us, sir, that he is suffering from tuberculous disease of the lungs. May I ask, was that the conclusion arrived at by a London consulting physician, and whether your own diagnosis has confirmed the assertion?"

The Resident Surgeon nodded with patronising indifference. He was not going to waste civilities upon this rowdy, drunken remittance-man, whom he had seen reeling through the streets of the stad as he went upon his own respectable way.

"Phthisis pulmonalis." He addressed his reply to the Chief. "And the process of lung-destruction is, as you will observe, sir, nearly complete."

He encountered from the Chief a look of cool displeasure that flushed him to the top of his knobby forehead, and set him blinking nervously behind his big round spectacles.

"Dr. Saxham asked you, sir, unless I mistake, whether you had ascertained by your own diagnosis, the ..." Lady Hannah's words came back to him. He recalled the "bit of information wormed out of the nurse," and ended with "the presence of the bacillus?"

Saxham's blue eyes thrust their rapier-points at him, and then plunged into the oyster-like orbs behind the spectacles of the Resident Surgeon, who rapidly grew from scarlet to purple, and from purple to pale green. Major Taggart and the Irishman exchanged a look of intelligence.

"Koch's bacillus, sir, were this a case of tuberculosis proper, would be present in the expectoration of the patient, and easy of demonstration under the microscope." Saxham's voice was cold as ice and cutting as tempered steel. "May we take it that you can personally testify to its presence here?" He pointed to the bed.

"And varra possibly," put in Taggart, "ye could submit a culture for present inspection? It would be gratifeeying to me and Captain McFadyen here, as weel as to our friend an' colleague Dr. Saxham, late of St. Stephen's-in-the-West, London, to varrafy the correctness o' your diagnosis."

"And it would that!" the Irishman chimed in. "So trot out your bacillus, by all manner of means!"

The Resident Surgeon babbled something incoherent, and melted out of the room.

"Moppin' his head as he goes down the passage," said McFadyen, coming back from the door.

"He'll no be in sic a sweatin' hurry to come back," pronounced the canny Scot, shedding a wink from a dry, red-fringed eyelid. He produced from the roomy breast-pocket of his khaki Service jacket a rubber-tubed stethoscope, and put it silently into the hand Saxham had mechanically stretched out for it. Then he drew back, his eyes, like those of the other two spectators of the strange scene that was beginning, fixed upon the chief actor in it. One other, weak after his swoon as a new-born child, lay passively, helplessly upon the bed.

Saxham, his square face stony and set, moved with a noiseless, feline, padding step towards the prone victim. A gleam of apprehension shot into Julius Fraithorn's great dark eyes, reopening now to consciousness. They fixed themselves, with an instinct born of that sudden thrill of fear, upon the lightly-closed right hand. Instantly comprehending, Saxham lifted the hand, showed that it held no instrument save the stethoscope, and dropped it again by his side, drawing nearer. Then the massive, close-cropped black head sank to the level of Julius Fraithorn's breast, revealed in its ghastly, emaciated nakedness by the open nightshirt. The massive shoulders bowed, the supple body curved, the keen ear joined itself to the heaving surface. In a moment more the agonising, hacking, rending cough came on. Julius battled for air. Raising him deftly and tenderly, Saxham signed to the nurse, who hurried to him, answering his low questions in whispers, giving aid where he indicated it required.

Steadily, patiently, the binaural stethoscope travelled over the lung area, gathering abnormal sounds, searching for silent spaces, sucking evidence into the assimilative brain behind the eyes that saw nothing but the man upon the bed, the locked human casket housing the secret that was slowly, surely coming to light. In the fierce determination to gain it, he threw the stethoscope away, and glued his avid ear to the man again.

"Toch! but I wouldna' have missed this for a kittie o' Kruger sovereigns!" the Chief Medical Officer whispered to his colleague from Meath. And McFadyen whispered back:

"Nor me, for your shoes. 'Ssh!"

Saxham was lifting up the great stooping shoulders, and beginning to speak in a voice totally different from that of the man known in Gueldersdorp as the Dop Doctor. Clear, ringing, concise, the sentences left his lips:

"Gentlemen, I invite your attention to a case of involuntary simulation of the symptoms distinguishing pulmonary tuberculosis by a patient suffering from a grave disease of totally different and possibly much less malignant character. Oblige me by stepping nearer!"

They crowded about the bed like eager students.

"In order to show what false conclusions loose modes of reasoning and the habitual reliance upon precedent may lead to, take the instance of the consulting physician to whom some years ago this young man, now barely thirty, and reduced, as you may see for yourselves, to the final extremity of physical decline, resorted."

"I would gie five shillin' if the man could hear his ain judgment!" murmured the Chief Medical Officer; for he had gleaned from a whispered answer of Julius's the omnipotent name of Sir Jedbury Fargoe. "Toch!" He chuckled dryly. Saxham went on:

"The consulting patient suffers from cough, painful and racking, from impaired digestive power, from increasing debility, fever, and night-sweats. He visits the specialist, convinced that he is consumptive, he receives confirmation of his convictions, and you see him to-day presenting the appearance, and reproducing all the symptoms of a patient in consumption's final stage. Possibly the germs of tuberculosis may be dormant in his organisation, waiting the opportunity to develop into activity! Possibly—a very remote possibility—the disease may have already attacked some organ of his body! But—and upon this point I can take my stand with the confidence of absolute certainty—the lungs of this so-called pulmonary sufferer are absolutely sound!"

"My certie! Send I may live to foregather wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe!" the Chief Medical Officer prayed inaudibly. "He will gang to the next International Consumption Congress wi' a smaller conceit of himsel', or my name's no Duncan Taggart!"

The lecturer, absorbed in his subject, lifted his hand to silence the murmur, and pursued:

"From what disease, then, is this man suffering? Logical and progressive conclusions drawn from experience, and based upon the local enlargement which the physicians previously consulted have apparently failed to perceive, lead me to diagnose the presence of a tumour in the mediastinum, extending its claws into the lungs, and seriously impeding their action and the action of the heart. An operation, serious and necessarily involving danger, is imperative. The growth may be benign or malignant; in the latter case I doubt whether the life of the patient is to be saved. But in the former case he has good hopes. Understand, I speak with certainty. Upon the presence of the growth, simple or otherwise, I am ready to stake my credit, my good name, my professional reputation——"

Ah! It rushed upon Saxham with a sickening shock of recollection that he was bankrupt in these things, and shame and anger strove for the mastery in his face, and anguish wrung a sob from him, despite his iron composure.

He wrenched at the collar about his swelling throat, as he turned away blindly towards the window, seeing nothing, fighting desperately with the horrible despair that had gripped him, and the mad, wild frenzy of yearning for the old, glorious life of strenuous effort and conscious power. Lost! lost! all that had been won.

"I ... I had forgotten ...!" he muttered; and then a hard, vigorous hand found his and gripped it.

"Go on forgetting, Saxham!" said a voice in his ear—a voice he knew, instantly steadying—such virtue is there in honest, heartfelt, comprehending sympathy between man and his fellow-man—the spinning brain, and quieting the leaping pulses, and giving him back, as nothing else could have done, his lost self-control. "You have earned the right!"

"Man, you're a wonder!" groaned the enraptured Chief Medical Officer. He added, with a relapse into the national caution: "That is, ye will be if your prognosis proves correc'. But the Taggarts are a' of the canny breed of Doobtin' Tammas, an sae I'll just keep a calm sugh till I see what the knife lays bare."

"Use the knife now, sir. At once—without delay!"

It was the weak, muffled voice of the patient on the bed. Saxham wheeled sharply about, and the stern blue eyes and the great lustrous pleading brown ones, looked into each other.

The pale Julius spoke again:

"I entreat you, Doctor!"

Saxham spoke in his curt way:

"You are aware that there is risk?"

Julius Fraithorn stretched out his transparent hands.

"What risk can there be to a man in my state? Look at these; and did I not hear you say ..."

"Whatever I may have said, sir, and however urgent I may admit the necessity for immediate operation, you must wait until to-morrow morning."

"I am fasting, sir, and fed. I received Holy Communion this morning, and have not yet breakfasted."

The return of the chart-nurse followed by a probationer carrying a laden tray provoked an exclamation from the little Irishman.

"Signs on it, the boy's as empty as a drum. The devil a wonder he went off like he did a bit back. And you can't deny him, Saxham?"

"I wad gie him the chance, Saxham"—this from Surgeon-Major Taggart—"in your place; and maybe I'm putting in six worrds for mysel' as well as half a dozen for the patient. For I have an auld bone to pyke wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe, aboot a Regimental patient he slew for me, three years back, wi' his jawbone of a Philistine ass."

Saxham spoke to Fraithorn authoritatively, kindly.

"You have no near relative to sign the Hospital Register?"

"My family are all in England, sir. I have not thought it necessary to distress them with the knowledge of my state."

"I think Lady Hannah Wrynche, who is now in Gueldersdorp, happens to be an acquaintance of theirs, if not a friend?"

Julius turned eagerly to the Colonel.

"It is true, she did come here yesterday. But I should hardly wish ... Surely, being of mature age and in the full possession of all my faculties"—there was a smile on the pale lips—"I may be allowed to sign the book myself?"

The doctors interchanged a look. The Colonel said to the patient:

"Mr. Fraithorn, if the idea is not unwelcome to you, I myself will sign the book, and"—he stooped over the bed and laid his hard, soldierly hand kindly on the pale one—"in the event of a less fortunate termination than that we hope for"—the faces of the three surgeons were a study in inscrutability—"I will communicate, as soon as any communication is rendered possible, with the Bishop and Mrs. Fraithorn."

The cough shook Julius as a terrier shakes a rat before he could gasp out:

"Thank you, sir. With all my heart I thank you!"

"You shall thank me when you get well!" The Chief shook the pale hand, crossed the bare boards to Saxham, who stood staring at them sullenly, and took him by the arm. They went out of the ward together, talking in low tones. The medical officers followed. Then the chart-nurse and the probationer who had been banished with the tray, came bustling back with towels, and razors, and a soapy solution in a basin, having a carbolic smell.

Dr. Saxham had gone to take a disinfecting bath, the nurse said, as she went about her minute preparations; and the Commanding Officer had gone with the Staff, and now her poor dear must let himself be got ready.

They wrapped the gaunt skeleton in a white blanket-robe with a heavy monkish cowl to it, and drew thick padded blanket-stockings over the ligament-tied, skin-covered bones that served the wasted wretch for legs, and wheeled in a high, narrow, rubber-wheeled, leather-cushioned stretcher, and laid him on it, light to lift, a very handful of humanity, and wheeled him, hooded and head-first, through the tile-floored passage and out into the golden African sunshine, that baked him gloriously through the coverings, and so into the main building and down a tile-floored passage there.

He prayed silently as he was wheeled, with blinded, cowled eyes, through double doors at the end....



XXVI

The operation was over, and the two Celts, self-appointed to the temporary posts of assistant-surgeon and anaesthetist, expressed their emotions in characteristic manner....

"Twelve minutes to a second between the first incision an' the last stitch.... Och, Owen, the jewel you are! Give me the loan of your fist, man, this minute."

"What price Sir Jedbury Fargoe the noo? The auld-farrant, scraichin', obstinate grey gander. A hand I will tak' at him ower the head o' this, or I'm no Taggart of Taggartshowe. Speaking wi' seriousness, Saxham, it was a pretty operation, an' performed wi' extraordinary quickness. And I'm sorry there are no' a baker's dozen o' patients for ye to deal wi'. It's a gran' treat to see a borrn genius use the knife."

"You could have done it yourself, Major, in less time."

"Maybe I could, and maybe I couldna! I doubt but we Army billies are better at puttin' men thegither than at takin' them to pieces in the long run.... Gently now, porter, wi' liftin' the patient.... Ay, McFadyen, that's richt, gie the man a hand. See to him, Saxham, is he no' fine to luik at? A wheen blue an' puffy, but the pulse is better than I would have expeckit. Wheel him awa', nurse; he'll no come round for another hour...."

They wheeled him away, back to the distant ward. The porter followed. The three surgeons standing by that grim table in the rubber-floored central space of the amphitheatre, fenced in by students' benches, vacant save for half a dozen whispering dressers, looked at one another. Bloused and aproned with sterilised material, masked, rubber-gloved, and slippered, and splashed with the same ominous stains that were on the table and upon the floor, Saxham's heavy-shouldered figure was as ominous and sinister as ever played a part in mediaeval torture-chamber, or figured in a nightmare-tale of Poe's device. You can see the other surgeons, bibbed and sleeved, the Irishman, small and dark and wiry, sousing a lethal array of sharp and gleaming implements in a glass bath of carbolic; Taggart, standing at a glass table, rubber-wheeled and movable, like everything else for use, and laden with rolls of lint and bandaging, and blue-glass bottles of peroxide of hydrogen and mercurial perchloride, daintily returning reels of silk-worm-gut and bobbins of silver wire to their velvet-lined case.

"You're no' fatigued? You would no' like a steemulant?"

Saxham started and withdrew his gaze. He had been staring with dull intensity of desire at the brandy-decanter, forgotten by the matron, whose usual charge it was. And the sharp blue-grey eye of Surgeon-Major Taggart followed the glance to its end in the golden-gleaming crystal.

"Fatigued? I hardly think so!"

He laughed, and the others joined in the laugh, remembering the lengthy line of patients operated on in a single mid-week morning at St. Stephen's. And yet his steady hand shook a little, and a curious soft, subtle dulness of sensation was stealing over him. He had gone to bed sober, had risen after three hours of blessed, unexpected, helpful sleep, to battle with his desperate craving until morning. When the old woman left in charge of the housekeeping arrangements had come to his door with hot water and his usual breakfast—a mug of strong coffee with milk and a roll—he had gulped down the reviving, steadying draught thirstily, and swallowed a mouthful or two of the bread; and when he was shaved and tubbed and clothed in the shabby white drill suit, had gone down to the dispensary and mixed himself a dose of chloric ether and strychnine, strong enough to brace his jarred nerves for the coming ordeal.

Not that Saxham habitually drugged: that craving was not yet known to him. But the habitual intemperance had exacted even from his iron constitution its forfeit of shakiness in the morning, and the rare sobriety left the man suffering and unstrung.

Looking about him as the dose began its work of stringing the lax nerves and stimulating the action of the heart, he saw that many of the drawers were open, a costly set of graduated scales missing, with their plush-lined box....

With a certain premonition of what would next be missing, he went into the surgery. A case of silver-mounted surgical instruments had vanished from a shelf, with a presentation loving-cup, given by admirers among De Boursy-Williams's patients to that gifted practitioner. A roll-top desk was partly broken open, but not rifled, the American boltlocks having defied the clumsy efforts of the thief, Koets, the Dutch dispensarist, who had cleared out of Gueldersdorp, under cover of the previous night, crossing, with the portable property reft from the accursed Englander, the barbed-wire fence that formed the line of demarcation between the British Imperial Forces and the Army of the United Republics. He had meant to wait yet another day, and take many things more, but the coming of those verdoemte soldiers of the Engelsch Commandant to fetch away the carboys of carbolic acid and the other medical stores had roused him to prompt action.

Later, wearing the brass badge of a Surgeon on the sleeve of his greasy black tail-coat, Koets ruled a Boer Field-Hospital, fearlessly slashing his way into the confidence of the United Republics through the tough, wincing brawn and muscle of Free Stater and Transvaaler. It speaks for the enduring qualities of the Boer constitution to say that many of his patients survived.

* * * * *

But the brandy in the decanter....

How it beckoned and allured and tempted. And the throat and palate of the man were parched with the desire of it. And yet, a moment before, with the toils about his feet, Saxham had wondered at the thought of these degraded years of bondage. He shook his head sullenly as Taggart repeated his question, and went away to wash and get dressed.

Then he meant to shake off his companions and go where he could quench that inward fire. He loathed them as they followed, chatting pleasantly....

But above the hissing of the hot water from the faucets over the basins came presently another sound, most familiar to the ears of the gossiping Celts....

"Rifle-fire! Out on the veld over yonder." McFadyen's towel waved North. "Do ye hear it?"

"Ay, do I! First bluid has been drawn. And to which side?"

Boom!...

The Hospital quivered to its foundations at the tremendous detonation. Shattered glass fell in showers of fragments from the roof of the operating-theatre, as the force of the explosion passed beneath the buildings in a surging of the ground on which they stood, a slow wave rolling southwards, without a backward draw.

The lavatory door had jammed, as doors will jam in earthquakes. Saxham tore it open, and the three shirt-sleeved, ensanguined men ran through the theatre, strewn with the debris from the roof, and through the double glazed doors communicating with the passage, populous with patients who should have been in bed, pursued by nurses as pale and shaken as their stampeding charges. The rear of the Hospital faces North, and they ran down a corridor full of dust, ending in more glazed doors, and tore out upon the back stoep, wide and roomy, and full of deck chairs and wicker lounges.

"Do ye see it? Ten thousand salted South African deevils! Do ye no' see it?" the Surgeon-Major yelled, pointing to a monstrous milk-white soap-bubble-shaped cloud that slowly rose up in the hot blue sky to the North and hung there, sullenly brooding.

"What is it, Major?" shouted Saxham, for behind them the Hospital was full of clamour. Nurses and dressers were running out into the grounds to listen and question and conjecture, the barely reclaimed veld beyond the palings was black with hurrying, shouting men, bandoliered, and carrying guns of every kind and calibre, from the venerable gaspipe of the native and the aged but still useful Martini-Henry of the citizen, to the Lee-Metford repeating-carbine, and the German magazine rifle of latest delivery to the troops of Imperial Majesty at Berlin. Men were clustered like bees on the flat tin roofs of the sheds at the Railway Works; men had climbed the signal-posts and were looking out from them over the sea of veld; the Volunteers garrisoning the Cemetery had poured from their temporary huts and dug-out shelters, and were massed on the top of their sand-bag mounds. A fair, handsome Staff officer, the younger of the two men who had accompanied the Colonel, went by at a tearing gallop, mounted on a fine grey charger, and followed by an orderly, while the pot-hat and truncheon of a scared native constable emerged timidly from the gaping jaws of a rusty water-cistern, long dismissed from Hospital use, and exiled to the open with other rubbish waiting transference to the scrap-heap; and far out upon the railway-line that vanished in the yellowing sea of veld an unseen engine screeched and screeched....

The Chief, in his pet post of vantage upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel, lowered his binoculars as the persistent whistle kept open. The lines about his keen eyes and mouth curved into a cheerful smile. The sound was coming nearer, and presently Engine 123 backed into view, a mile or so from waiting, expectant Gueldersdorp, and snorting, raced at full speed for her home in the railway-yard. Her driver was the young Irishman from the County Kildare, and her guard hailed from Shoreditch. And both of them had a tale to tell of what Taggart had called the Colonel's double surprise-packet, to a tall man whom they found waiting on the metals by the upper Signal Cabin.

"Six mile from the start, sorra a yard more or less, sorr! I sees a comp'ny o' thim divils mustered on the bog, I mane the veld, sorr—smokin' their pipes an' passin' the bottle, an' givin' the overlook to a gang av odthers, that was rippin' up the rails undher the directions av a head-gaffer wid a hat brim like me granny's tay-thray, an' a beard like the Prophet Moses."

"I sor 'is whoppin' big 'at myself, though we was two mile off when we picked the beggars out," the guard objected; "but 'ow could you twig 'is beard or that the other blokes was smokin'?"

"Did ye ever know a Dutch boss av any kind clane-shaved an' not hairy-faced?" was Kildare's just retort, "or see a crowd av Doppers gathered together that the blue smoke av the Blessed Creature was not curlin' out av their mouths an' ears an' noses, an' Old Square Face or Van der Hump makin' the rounds?"

"You thought the blokes on the metals was a workin' gang of our chaps at the fust go off," complained the guard, "an' you opened the whistle to warn 'em!"

"He did that for sure," put in the Cardiff stoker. "But he was tipping me the wink while he did it, so he was; as much as to say he knew they were Boers all the time."

"Would they have stopped where they was, well widin range, av I had let on I knew they was a parcel av unwashed Dutchmen?" demanded Kildare hotly. "Would they have hung on as I pushed her towards thim—would they have stopped to watch me uncouplin' the two thrucks, smilin' wid simple interest in their haythen faces, av they had not taken me for a suckin' lamb in oily overalls that took themselves for sheep av the same fold?"