A LOCOMOTIVE is, next to a marine engine, the most sensitive thing man ever made; and No. ·007, besides being sensitive, was new. The red paint was hardly dry on his spotless bumper-bar, his headlight shone like a fireman’s helmet, and his cab might have been a hardwood-finish parlour. They had run him into the round-house after his trial—he had said good-bye to his best friend in the shops, the overhead travelling-crane—the big world was just outside; and the other locos were taking stock of him. He looked at the semicircle of bold, unwinking headlights, heard the low purr and mutter of the steam mounting in the gauges—scornful hisses of contempt as a slack valve lifted a little—and would have given a month’s oil for leave to crawl through his own driving-wheels into the brick ash-pit beneath him. ·007 was an eight-wheeled ‘American’ loco, slightly different from others of his type, and as he stood he was worth ten thousand dollars on the Company’s books. But if you had bought him at his own valuation, after half an hour’s waiting in the darkish, echoing round-house, you would have saved exactly nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-eight cents. A heavy Mogul freight, with a short cowcatcher and a fire-box that came down within three inches of the rail, began the impolite game, speaking to a Pittsburgh Consolidation, who was visiting.

‘Where did this thing blow in from?’ he asked, with a dreamy puff of light steam.

‘It’s all I can do to keep track of our makes,’ was the answer, ‘without lookin’ after your back-numbers. ‘Guess it’s something Peter Cooper left over when he died.’

·007 quivered; his steam was getting up, but he held his tongue. Even a hand-car knows what sort of locomotive it was that Peter Cooper experimented upon in the far-away Thirties. It carried its coal and water in two apple-barrels, and was not much bigger than a bicycle.

Then up and spoke a small, newish switching-engine, with a little step in front of his bumper-timber, and his wheels so close together that he looked like a broncho getting ready to buck.

‘Something’s wrong with the road when a Pennsylvania gravel-pusher tells us anything about our stock, I think. That kid’s all right. Eustis designed him, and Eustis designed me. Ain’t that good enough?’

·007 could have carried the switching-loco round the yard in his tender, but he felt grateful for even this little word of consolation.

‘We don’t use hand-cars on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘That—er—peanut-stand’s old enough and ugly enough to speak for himself.’

‘He hasn’t bin spoken to yet. He’s bin spoken at. Hain’t ye any manners on the Pennsylvania?’ said the switching-loco.

‘You ought to be in the yard, Pony,’ said the Mogul, severely. ‘We’re all long-haulers here.’

‘That’s what you think,’ the little fellow replied. ‘You’ll know more ’fore the night’s out. I’ve bin down to Track 17, and the freight there—oh, Christmas!’

‘I’ve trouble enough in my own division,’ said a lean, light suburban loco with very shiny brake-shoes. My commuters wouldn’t rest till they got a parlour-car. They’ve hitched her back of all, and she hauls worse’n a snow-plough. I’ll snap her off some day sure, and then they’ll blame every one except their foolselves. They’ll be askin’ me to haul a vestibuled next!’

‘They made you in New Jersey, didn’t they?’ said Pony. ‘Thought so. Commuters and truck-waggons ain’t any sweet haulin’, but I tell you they’re a heap better’n cuttin’ out refrigerator-cars or oil-tanks. Why, I’ve hauled——’

‘Haul! You?’ said the Mogul contemptuously. ‘It’s all you can do to bunt a cold-storage car up the yard. Now, I—’ he paused a little to let the words sink in—‘I handle the Flying Freight—e-leven cars worth just anything you please to mention. On the stroke of eleven I pull out; and I’m timed for thirty-five an hour. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! Suburban traffic’s only but one degree better than switching. Express freight’s what pays.’

‘Well, I ain’t given to blowing, as a rule,’ began the Pittsburgh Consolidation.

‘No? You was sent in here because you grunted on the grade,’ Pony interrupted.

‘Where I grunt, you’d lie down, Pony; but, as I was saying, I don’t blow much. Notwithstandin’, if you want to see freight that is freight moved lively, you should see me warbling through the Alleghanies with thirty-seven ore-cars behind me, and my brake-men fightin’ tramps so’s they can’t attend to my tooter. I have to do all the holdin’ back then, and, though I say it, I’ve never had a load get away from me yet. No, sir. Haulin’ ’s one thing, but judgment and discretion’s another. You want judgment in my business.’

‘Ah! But—but are you not paralysed by a sense of your overwhelming responsibilities?’ said a curious, husky voice from a corner.

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‘Who’s that?’ ·007 whispered to the Jersey commuter.

‘Compound—experiment—N.G. She’s bin switchin’ in the B. & A. yards for six months, when she wasn’t in the shops. She’s economical (I call it mean) in her coal, but she takes it out in repairs. Ahem! I presume you found Boston somewhat isolated, madam, after your New York season?’

‘I am never so well occupied as when I am alone.’ The Compound seemed to be talking from halfway up her smoke-stack.

‘Sure,’ said the irreverent Pony, under his breath. ‘They don’t hanker after her any in the yard.’

‘But, with my constitution and temperament—my work lies in Boston—I find your outrecuidance——’

‘Outer which?’ said the Mogul freight.

‘Simple cylinders are good enough for me.’

‘Perhaps I should have, said faroucherie,’ hissed the Compound.

‘I don’t hold with any make of papier-mâché wheel,’ the Mogul insisted.

The Compound sighed pityingly, and said no more.

‘Git ’em all shapes in this world, don’t ye?’ said Pony. ‘That’s Mass’chusetts all over. They half start, an’ then they stick on a dead-centre, an’ blame it all on other folk’s ways o’ treatin’ them. Talkin’ o’ Boston, Comanche told me, last night, he had a hot-box just beyond the Newtons, Friday. That was why, he says, the Accommodation was held up. Made out no end of a tale, Comanche did.’

‘If I’d heard that in the shops, with my boiler out for repairs, I’d know ’t was one o’ Comanche’s lies,’ the New Jersey commuter snapped. ‘Hot-box! Him! What happened was they’d put an extra car on, and he just lay down on the grade and squealed. They had to send 127 to help him through. Made it out a hot-box, did he? Time before that he said he was ditched! Looked me square in the headlight and told me that as cool as—as a water-tank in a cold wave. Hot-box! You ask 127 about Comanche’s hot-box. Why, Comanche he was side-tracked, and 127 (he was just about as mad as they make ’em on account o’ being called out at ten o’clock at night) took hold and whirled her into Boston in seventeen minutes. Hot-box! Hot fraud! That’s what Comanche is.’

Then ·007 put both drivers and his pilot into it, as the saying is, for he asked what sort of thing a hot-box might be?

‘Paint my bell sky blue!’ said Pony, the switcher. ‘Make me a surface-railroad loco with a hardwood skirtin’-board round my wheels! Break me up and cast me into five-cent sidewalk-fakirs’ mechanical toys! Here’s an eight-wheel coupled “American” don’t know what a hot-box is! Never heard of an emergency-stop either, did ye? Don’t know what ye carry jack-screws for? You’re too innocent to be left alone with your own tender. Oh, you—you flat-car!’

There was a roar of escaping steam before any one could answer, and ·007 nearly blistered his paint off with pure mortification.

‘A hot-box,’ began the Compound, picking and choosing the words as though they were coal, ‘a hot-box is the penalty exacted from inexperience by haste. Ahem!’

‘Hot-box!’ said the Jersey Suburban. ‘It’s the price you pay for going on the tear. It’s years since I’ve had one. It’s a disease that don’t attack short-haulers, as a rule.’

‘We never have hot-boxes on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘They get ’em in New York—same as nervous prostration.’

‘Ah, go home on a ferry-boat,’ said the Mogul. ‘You think because you use worse grades than our road ’ud allow, you’re a kind of Alleghany angel. Now, I’ll tell you what you . . . Here’s my folk. Well, I can’t stop. See you later, perhaps.’

He rolled forward majestically to the turntable, and swung like a man-of-war in a tideway, till he picked up his track. ‘But as for you, you pea-green swivellin’ coffee-pot [this to ·007], you go out and learn something before you associate with those who’ve made more mileage in a week than you’ll roll up in a year. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! S’long.’

‘Split my tubes if that’s actin’ polite to a new member o’ the Brotherhood,’ said Pony. ‘There wasn’t any call to trample on ye like that. But manners was left out when Moguls was made. Keep up your fire, kid, an’ burn you own smoke. ’Guess we’ll all be wanted in a minute.’

Men were talking rather excitedly in the roundhouse. One man, in a dingy jersey, said that he hadn’t any locomotives to waste on the yard. Another man, with a piece of crumpled paper in his hand, said that the yard-master said that he was to say that if the other man said anything, he (the other man) was to shut his head. Then the other man waved his arms, and wanted to know if he was expected to keep locomotives in his hip-pocket. Then a man in a black Prince Albert, without a collar, came up dripping, for it was a hot August night, and said that what he said went; and between the three of them the locomotives began to go, too—first the Compound, then the Consolidation, then ·007.

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Now, deep down in his fire-box, ·007 had cherished a hope that as soon as his trial was done, he would be led forth with songs and shoutings, and attached to a green-and-chocolate vestibuled flyer, under charge of a bold and noble engineer, who would pat him on his back, and weep over him and call him his Arab steed. (The boys in the shops where he was built used to read wonderful stories of railroad life, and ·007 expected things to happen as he had heard.) But there did not seem to be many vestibuled flyers in the roaring, rumbling, electric-lighted yards, and his engineer only said:

‘Now, what sort of a fool-sort of an injector has Eustis loaded on to this rig this time?’ And he put the lever over with an angry snap, crying ‘Am I supposed to switch with this thing, hey?’

The collarless man mopped his head, and replied that, in the present state of the yard and freight and a few other things, the engineer would switch and keep on switching till the cows came home. ·007 pushed out gingerly, his heart in his headlight, so nervous that the clang of his own bell almost made him jump the track. Lanterns waved, or danced up and down, before and behind him; and on every side, six tracks deep, sliding backward and forward, with clashings of couplers and squeals of hand-brakes, were cars—more cars than ·007 had dreamed of. There were oil-cars, and hay-cars, and stock-cars full of lowing beasts, and ore-cars, and potato-cars with stovepipe-ends sticking out in the middle; cold-storage and refrigerator cars dripping ice-water on the tracks; ventilated fruit—and milk-cars; flat-cars with truck-waggons full of market-stuff; flat-cars loaded with reapers and binders, all red and green and gilt under the sizzling electric lights; flat cars piled high with strong-scented hides, pleasant hemlock-plank, or bundles of shingles; flat-cars creaking to the weight of thirty-ton castings, angle-irons, and rivet-boxes for some new bridge; and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of box-cars loaded, locked and chalked. Men—hot and angry—crawled among and between and under the thousand wheels; men took flying jumps through his cab, when he halted for a moment; men sat on his pilot as he went forward, and on his tender as he returned; and regiments of men ran along the tops of the box-cars beside him, screwing down brakes, waving their arms, and crying curious things.

He was pushed forward a foot at a time, whirled backwards, his rear drivers clinking and clanking, a quarter of a mile; jerked into a switch (yard-switches are very stubby and unaccommodating), bunted into a Red D, or Merchants’ Transport car, and, with no hint or knowledge of the weight behind him, started up anew. When his load was fairly on the move, three or four cars would be cut off, and ·007 would bound forward, only to be held hiccupping on the brake. Then he would wait a few minutes, watching the whirled lanterns, deafened with the clang of the bells, giddy with the vision of the sliding cars, his brake pump panting forty to the minute, his front coupler lying sideways on his cow-catcher, like a tired dog’s tongue in his mouth, and the whole of him covered with half-burnt coal-dust.

‘’Tisn’t so easy switching with a straight-backed tender,’ said his little friend of the round-house, bustling by at a trot. ‘But you’re cumin’ on pretty fair. Ever seen a flyin’ switch? No? Then watch me.’

Pony was in charge of a dozen heavy flat-cars. Suddenly he shot away from them with a sharp ‘Whutt!’ A switch opened in the shadows ahead; he turned up it like a rabbit, it snapped behind him, and the long line of twelve-foot-high lumber jolted on into the arms of a full-sized road-loco, who acknowledged receipt with a dry howl.

‘My man’s reckoned the smartest in the yard at that trick,’ he said, returning. ‘Gives me cold shivers when another fool tries it, though. That’s where my short wheel-base comes in. Like as not you’d have your tender scraped off if you tried it.’

·007 had no ambitions that way, and said so.

‘No? Of course this ain’t your regular business, but say, don’t you think it’s interestin’? Have you seen the yard-master? Well, he’s the greatest man on earth, an’ don’t you forget it. When are we through? Why, kid, it’s always like this, day an’ night—Sundays and week-days. See that thirty-car freight slidin’ in four, no, five tracks off? She’s all mixed freight, sent here to be sorted out into straight trains. That’s why we’re cuttin’ out the cars one by one.’ He gave a vigorous push to a west-bound car as he spoke, and started back with a little snort of surprise, for the car was an old friend—an M.T.K. box-car.

‘Jack my drivers, but it’s Homeless Kate. Why, Kate, ain’t there no gettin’ you back to your friends? There’s forty chasers out for you from your road, if there’s one. Who’s holdin’ you now?’

‘Wish I knew,’ whimpered Homeless Kate. ‘I belong in Topeka, but I’ve bin to Cedar Rapids; I’ve bin to Winnipeg; I’ve bin to Newport News; I’ve bin all down the old Atlanta and West Point; an’ I’ve bin to Buffalo. Maybe I’ll fetch up at Haverstraw. I’ve only bin out ten months, but I’m homesick—I’m just achin’ homesick.’

‘Try Chicago, Katie,’ said the switching-loco; and the battered old car lumbered down the track, jolting; ‘I want to be in Kansas when the sunflowers bloom.’

‘Yard’s full o’ Homeless Kates an’ Wanderin’ Willies,’ he explained to ·007. ‘I knew an old Fitchburg flat-car out seventeen months; an’ one of ours was gone fifteen ’fore ever we got track of her. Dunno quite how our men fix it. Swap around, I guess. Anyway, I’ve done my duty. She’s on her way to Kansas, via Chicago; but I’ll lay my next boilerful she’ll be held there to wait consignee’s convenience, and sent back to us with wheat in the fall.”

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Just then the Pittsburgh Consolidation passed, at the head of a dozen cars.

‘I’m goin’ home,’ he said proudly.

‘Can’t get all them twelve on to the flat. Break ’em in half, Dutchy! ‘cried Pony. But it was ·007 who was backed down to the last six cars, and he nearly blew up with surprise when he found himself pushing them on to a huge ferryboat. He had never seen deep water before, and shivered as the flat drew away and left his bogies within six inches of the black, shiny tide.

After this he was hurried to the freight-house, where he saw the yard-master, a smallish, white-faced man in shirt, trousers, and slippers, looking down upon a sea of trucks, a mob of bawling truckmen, and squadrons of backing, turning, sweating, spark-striking horses.

‘That’s shippers’ carts loadin’ on to the receivin’ trucks,’ said the small engine reverently. ‘But he don’t care. He lets ’em cuss. He’s the Czar—King—Boss! He says “Please,” and then they kneel down an’ pray. There’s three or four strings o’ to-day’s freight to be pulled before he can attend to them. When he waves his hand that way, things happen.’

A string of loaded cars slid out down the track, and a string of empties took their place. Bales, crates, boxes, jars, carboys, frails, cases, and packages; flew into them from the freight-house as though the cars had been magnets and they iron filings.

‘Ki-yah!’ shrieked little Pony. ‘Ain’t it great?’

A purple-faced truckman shouldered his way to the yard-master, and shook his fist under his nose.

The yard-master never looked up from his bundle of freight-receipts. He crooked his forefinger slightly, and a tall young man in a red shirt, lounging carelessly beside him, hit the truckman under the left ear, so that he dropped, quivering and clucking, on a hay-bale.

‘Eleven, seven, ninety-seven, L.Y.S.; fourteen ought ought three; nineteen thirteen; one one four; seventeen ought twenty-one M. B.; and the ten west-bound. All straight except the two last. Cut ’em off at the junction. An’ that’s all right. Pull that string.’ The yard-master, with mild blue eyes, looked out over the howling truckmen at the waters in the moonlight beyond, and hummed:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lawd Gawd made them all!

·007 moved the cars out and delivered them to the regular road-engine. He had never felt quite so limp in his life.

‘Curious, ain’t it?’ said Pony, puffing, on the next track. ‘You an’ me, if we got that man under our bumpers, we’d work him into red waste and not know what we’d done; but—up there—with the steam hummin’ in his boiler that awful quiet way . . .’

‘I know,’ said ·007. ‘Makes me feel as if I’d dropped my fire an’ was getting cold. He is the greatest man on earth.’

They were at the far north end of the yard now, under a switch-tower, looking down on the four-track way of the main traffic. The Boston Compound was to haul ·007’s string to some faraway northern junction over an indifferent road-bed, and she mourned aloud for the ninety-six pound rails of the B.&A.

‘You’re young; you’re young,’ she coughed. ‘You don’t realise your responsibilities.’

‘Yes, he does,’ said Pony sharply; ‘but he don’t lie down under ’em.’ Then, with a sidespurt of steam, exactly like a tough spitting ‘There ain’t more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth o’ freight behind her anyway, and she carries on as if ’twere a hundred thousand—same as the Mogul’s. Excuse me, madam, but you’ve the track. . . . She’s stuck on a dead-centre again—bein’ specially designed not to.’

The Compound crawled across the tracks on a long slant, groaning horribly at each switch, and moving like a cow in a snow-drift. There was a little pause along the yard after her tail-lights had disappeared; switches locked crisply, and every one seemed to be waiting.

‘Now I’ll show you something worth,’ said Pony. ‘When the Purple Emperor ain’t on time, it’s about time to amend the Constitution. The first stroke of twelve is——’

‘Boom!’ went the clock in the big yard-tower, and far away ·007 heard a full vibrating ‘Yah! Yah! Yah!’ A headlight twinkled on the horizon like a star, grew an overpowering blaze, and whooped up the humming track to the roaring music of a happy giant’s song:

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With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She climbed upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah!

The last defiant ‘yah! yah!’ was delivered a mile and a half beyond the passenger-depôt; but ·007 had caught one glimpse of the superb six-wheel-coupled racing-locomotive, who hauled the pride and glory of the road—the gilt-edged Purple Emperor, the millionaires’ south-bound express, laying the miles over his shoulder as a man peels a shaving from a soft board. The rest was a blur of maroon enamel, a bar of white light from the electrics in the cars, and a flicker of nickel-plated hand-rail on the rear platform.

‘Ooh!’ said ·007.

‘Seventy-five miles an hour these five miles. Baths, I’ve heard; barber’s shop; ticker; and a library and the rest to match. Yes, sir; seventy-five an hour! But he’ll talk to you in the roundhouse just as democratic as I would. And I—cuss—my wheel-base!—I’d kick clean off the track at half his gait. He’s the master of our Lodge. Cleans up at our house. I’ll introdooce you some day. He’s worth knowin’! There ain’t many can sing that song, either.’

·007 was too full of emotions to answer. He did not hear a raging of telephone-bells in the switch-tower, nor the man, as he leaned out and called to ·007’s engineer: ‘Got any steam?’

‘ ’Nough to run her a hundred mile out o’ this, if I could,’ said the engineer, who belonged to the open road and hated switching.

‘Then get. The Flying Freight’s ditched forty mile out, with fifty rod o’ track ploughed up. No; no one’s hurt, but both tracks are blocked. Lucky the wreckin’-car an’ derrick are this end of the yard. Crew’ll be along in a minute. Hurry! You’ve the track.’

‘Well, I could jest kick my little sawed-off self,’ said Pony, as ·007 was backed, with a bang, on to a grim and grimy car like a caboose, but full of tools—a flat-car and a derrick behind it. ‘Some folks are one thing, and some are another; but you’re in luck, kid. They push a wrecking-car. Now, don’t get rattled. Your wheel-base will keep you on the track, and there ain’t any curves worth mentionin’. Oh, say! Comanche told me there’s one section o’ saw-edged track that’s liable to jounce ye a little. Fifteen an’ a half out, after the grade at Jackson’s crossin’. You’ll know it by a farmhouse an’ a windmill and five maples in the dooryard. Windmill’s west o’ the maples. An’ there’s an eighty-foot iron bridge in the middle o’ that section with no guard-rails. See you later. Luck!’

Before he knew well what had happened, ·007 was flying up the track into the dumb dark world. Then fears of the night beset him. He remembered all he had ever heard of landslides, rain-piled boulders, blown trees, and strayed cattle, all that the Boston Compound had ever said of responsibility, and a great deal more that came out of his own head. With a very quavering voice he whistled for his first grade crossing (an event in the life of a locomotive), and his nerves were in no way restored by the sight of a frantic horse, and a white-faced man in a buggy less than a yard from his right shoulder. Then he was sure he would jump the track; felt his flanges mounting the rail at every curve; knew that his first grade would make him lie down even as Comanche had done at the Newtons. He swept down the grade to Jackson’s crossing, saw the windmill west of the maples, felt the badly-laid rails spring under him, and sweated big drops all over his boiler. At each jarring bump he believed an axle had smashed; and he took the eighty-foot bridge without the guard-rail like a hunted cat on the top of a fence. Then a wet leaf stuck against the glass of his headlight and threw a flying shadow on the track, so that he thought it was some little dancing animal that would feel soft if he ran over it; and anything soft underfoot frightens a locomotive as it does an elephant. But the men behind seemed quite calm. The wrecking-crew were climbing carelessly from the caboose to the tender—even jesting with the engineer, for he heard a shuffling of feet among the coal, and the snatch of a song, something like this:

Oh, the Empire State must learn to wait,
And the Cannon-ball go hang,
When the West-bound’s ditched, and the tool-car’s hitched,
And it’s ’way for the Breakdown Gang (Tara-ra!)
’Way for the Breakdown Gang!

‘Say! Eustis knew what he was doin’ when he designed this rig. She’s a hummer. New, too.’

‘Sniff! Phew! She is new. That ain’t paint. That’s——’

A burning pain shot through ·007’s right rear driver—a crippling, stinging pain.

‘This,’ said ·007, as he flew, ‘is a hot-box. Now I know what it means. I shall go to pieces, I guess. My first road-run, too!’

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‘Het a bit, ain’t she?’ the fireman ventured to suggest to the engineer.

‘She’ll hold for all we want of her. We’re ’most there. ‘Guess you chaps back had better climb into your car,’ said the engineer, his hand on the brake-lever. ‘I’ve seen men snapped off——’

But the crew fled laughing. They had no wish to be jerked on to the track. The engineer half turned his wrist, and ·007 found his drivers pinned firm.

‘Now it’s come!’ said ·007, as he yelled aloud, and slid like a sleigh. For the moment he fancied that he would jerk bodily from off his underpinning.

‘That must be the emergency-stop Pony guyed me about,’ he gasped, as soon as he could think. ‘Hot-box—emergency-stop. They both hurt; but now I can talk back in the round-house.’

He was halted, all hissing hot, a few feet in the rear of what doctors would call a compound-comminuted car. His engineer was kneeling down among his drivers, but he did not call ·007 his ‘Arab steed,’ nor cry over him, as the engineers did in the newspapers. He just bad-worded ·007, and pulled yards of charred cotton-waste from about the axles, and hoped he might some day catch the idiot who had packed it. Nobody else attended to him, for Evans, the Mogul’s engineer, a little cut about the head, but very angry, was exhibiting, by lantern-light, the mangled corpse of a slim blue pig.

‘’T weren’t even a decent-sized hog,’ he said. ‘’T were a shote.’

‘Dangerousest beasts they are,’ said one of the crew. ‘Get under the pilot an’ sort o’ twiddle ye off the track, don’t they?’

‘Don’t they?’ roared Evans, who was a red headed Welshman. ‘You talk as if I was ditched by a hog every fool-day o’ the week. I ain’t friends with all the cussed half-fed shotes in the State o’ New York. No, indeed! Yes, this is him—an’ look what he’s done!’

It was not a bad night’s work for one stray piglet. The Flying Freight seemed to have flown in every direction, for the Mogul had mounted the rails and run diagonally a few hundred feet from right to left, taking with him such cars as cared to follow. Some did not. They broke their couplers and lay down, while rear cars frolicked over them. In that game, they had ploughed up and removed and twisted a good deal of the left-hand track. The Mogul himself had waddled into a corn-field, and there he knelt—fantastic wreaths of green twisted round his crank-pins; his pilot covered with solid clods of field, on which corn nodded drunkenly; his fire put out with dirt (Evans had done that as soon as he recovered his senses); and his broken headlight half full of half-burnt moths. His tender had thrown coal all over him, and he looked like a disreputable buffalo who had tried to wallow in a general store. For there lay, scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars, typewriters, sewing-machines, bicycles in crates, a consignment of silver-plated imported harness, French dresses and gloves, a dozen finely moulded hardwood mantels, a fifteen-foot naphtha-launch, with. a solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows, a case of telescopes and microscopes, two coffins, a case of very best candies, some gilt-edged dairy produce, butter and eggs in an omelette, a broken box of expensive toys, and a few hundred other luxuries. A camp of tramps hurried up from nowhere, and generously volunteered to help the crew. So the brakemen, armed with coupler-pins, walked up and down on one side, and the freight-conductor and the fireman patrolled the other with their hands in their hip-pockets. A long-bearded man came out of a house beyond the corn-field, and told Evans that if the accident had happened a little later in the year, all his corn would have been burned, and accused Evans of carelessness. Then he ran away, for Evans was at his heels shrieking, ‘’Twas his hog done it—his hog done it! Let me kill him! Let me kill him!’ Then the wrecking-crew laughed; and the farmer put his head out of a window and said that Evans was no gentleman.

But ·007 was very sober. He had never seen a wreck before, and it frightened him. The crew still laughed, but they worked at the same time; and ·007 forgot horror in amazement at the way they handled the Mogul freight. They dug round him with spades; they put ties in front of his wheels, and jack-screws under him; they embraced him with the derrick-chain and tickled him with crowbars; while ·007 was hitched on to wrecked cars and backed away till the knot broke or the cars rolled clear of the track. By dawn thirty or forty men’ were at work, replacing and ramming down the ties, gauging the rails and spiking them. By daylight all cars who could move had gone on in charge of another loco; the track was freed for traffic; and ·007 had hauled the old Mogul over a small pavement of ties, inch by inch, till his flanges bit the rail once more, and he settled down with a clank. But his spirit was broken, and his nerve was gone.

‘’T weren’t even a hog,’ he repeated dolefully; ‘’t were a shote; and you—you of all of ’em—had to help me on.’

‘But how in the whole long road did it happen?’ asked ·007, sizzling with curiosity.

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‘Happen! It didn’t happen! It just come! I sailed right on top of him around that last curve—thought he was a skunk. Yes; he was all as little as that. He hadn’t more’n squealed once ’fore I felt my bogies lift (he’d rolled right under the pilot), and I couldn’t catch the track again to save me. Swivelled clean off, I was. Then I felt him sling himself along, all greasy, under my left leadin’ driver, and, oh, Boilers! that mounted the rail. I heard my flanges zippin’ along the ties, an’ the next I knew I was playin’ “Sally, Sally Waters” in the corn, my tender shuckin’ coal through my cab, an’ old man Evans lying’ still an’ bleedin’ in front o’ me. Shook? There ain’t a stay or a bolt or a rivet in me that ain’t sprung to glory somewhere.’

‘Umm!’ said ·007. ‘What d’ you reckon you weigh?’

‘Without these lumps o’ dirt I’m all of a hundred thousand pound.’

‘And the shote?’

‘Eighty. Call him a hundred pounds at the outside. He’s worth about four’n a half dollars. Ain’t it awful? Ain’t it enough to give you nervous prostration? Ain’t it paralysin’? Why, I come just around that curve——’ and the Mogul told the tale again, for he was very badly shaken.

‘Well, it’s all in the day’s run, I guess,’ said ·007, soothingly; ‘an’—an’ a corn-field’s pretty soft fallin’.’

‘If it had bin a sixty-foot bridge, an’ I could ha’ slid off into deep water, an’ blown up an’ killed both men, same as others have done, I wouldn’t ha’ cared: but to be ditched by a shote—an’ you to help me out—in a corn-field—an’ an old hayseed in his nightgown cussin’ me like as if I was a sick truck-horse! . . . Oh, it’s awful! Don’t call me Mogul! I’m a sewin’-machine. They’ll guy my sand-box off in the yard.’

And ·007, his hot-box cooled and his experience vastly enlarged, hauled the Mogul freight slowly to the round-house.

‘Hello, old man! Bin out all night, hain’t ye?’ said the irrepressible Pony, who had just come off duty. ‘Well, I must say you look it. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s you! Go to the shops, take them vine-leaves out o’ your hair, an’ git ’em to play the hose on you.’

‘Leave him alone, Pony,’ said ·007 severely, as he was swung on the turn-table, ’or I’ll——’

‘’Didn’t know the old granger was any special friend o’ yours, kid. He wasn’t over civil to you last time I saw him.’

‘I know it; but I’ve seen a wreck since then, and it has about scared the paint off me. I’m not going to guy any one as long as I steam—not when they’re new to the business an’ anxious to learn. And I’m not goin’ to guy the old Mogul either, though I did find him wreathed around with roastin’-ears. ’Twas a little bit of a shote—not a hog—just a shote, Pony—no bigger’n a lump of anthracite—I saw it—that made all the mess. Anybody can be ditched, I guess.’

‘Found that out already, have you? Well, that’s a good beginnin’.’ It was the Purple Emperor, with his high, tight, plate-glass cab and green velvet cushion, waiting to be cleaned for his next day’s fly.

‘Let me make you two gen’lemen acquainted,’ said Pony. ‘This is our Purple Emperor, kid, whom you were admirin’ and, I may say, envyin’ last night. This is a new brother, worshipful sir, with most of his mileage ahead of him, but, so far as a serving brother can, I’ll answer for him.’

‘’Happy to meet you,’ said the Purple Emperor, with a glance round the crowded round-house. ‘I guess there are enough of us here to form a full meetin’. Ahem! By virtue of the authority vested in me as Head of the Road, I hereby declare and pronounce No. ·007 a full and accepted Brother of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotives, and as such entitled to all shop, switch, track, tank, and round-house privileges throughout my jurisdiction, in the Degree of Superior Flier, it bein’ well known and credibly reported to me that our Brother has covered forty-one miles in thirty-nine minutes and a half on an errand of mercy to the afflicted. At a convenient time, I myself will communicate to you the ‘Song and Signal of this Degree whereby you may be recognised in the darkest night. Take your stall, newly-entered Brother among Locomotives!’

Now, in the darkest night, even as the Purple Emperor said, if you will stand on the bridge across the freight-yard, looking down upon the four-track way, at 2.30 A.M., neither before nor after, when the White Moth, that takes the overflow from the Purple Emperor, tears south with her seven vestibuled cream-white cars, you will hear, as the yard-clock makes the half-hour, a faraway sound like the bass of a violoncello, and then, a hundred feet to each word:

With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah! Yah
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter!  Yah! Yah! Yah
She climb upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah!

That is ·007 covering his one hundred and fifty six miles in two hundred and twenty-one minutes.

He drank strong waters and his speech was coarse;
He purchased raiment and forbore to pay;
He stuck a trusting junior with a horse,
And won Gymkhanas in a doubtful way.
Then, ’twixt a vice and folly, turned aside
To do good deeds and straight to cloak them, lied.
(The Mess Room)

(a short tale)

IF Reggie Burke were in India now he would resent this tale being told; but as he is in Hongkong and won’t see it, the telling is safe. He was the man who worked the big fraud on the Sind and Sialkote Bank. He was manager of an up-country Branch, and a sound practical man with a large experience of native loan and insurance work. He could combine the frivolities of ordinary life with his work, and yet do well. Reggie Burke rode anything that would let him get up, danced as neatly as he rode, and was wanted for every sort of amusement in the Station.

As he said himself, and as many men found out rather to their surprise, there were two Burkes, both very much at your service. ‘Reggie Burke,’ between four and ten, ready for anything from a hot-weather gymkhana to a riding-picnic, and, between ten and four, ‘Mr. Reginald Burke, Manager of the Sind and Sialkote Branch Bank.’ You might play polo with him one afternoon and hear him express his opinions when a man crossed; and you might call on him next morning to raise a two-thousand rupee loan on a five hundred pound insurance policy, eighty pounds paid in premiums. He would recognise you, but you would have some trouble in recognising him.

The Directors of the Bank—it had its headquarters in Calcutta, and its General Manager’s word carried weight with the Government—picked their men well. They had tested Reggie up to a fairly severe breaking-strain. They trusted him just as much as Directors ever trust Managers. You must see for yourself whether their trust was misplaced.

Reggie’s Branch was in a big Station, and worked with the usual staff: one Manager, one Accountant, both English, a Cashier, and a horde of native clerks; besides the Police patrol at nights outside. The bulk of its work, for it was in a thriving district, was hoondi and accommodation of all kinds. A fool has no grip of this sort of business; and a clever man who does not go about among his clients, and know more than a little of their affairs, is worse than a fool. Reggie was young-looking, clean-shaved, with a twinkle in his eye, and a head that nothing short of a gallon of the Gunners’ Madeira could make any impression on.

One day, at a big dinner, he announced casually that the Directors had shifted on to him a Natural Curiosity, from England, in the Accountant line. He was perfectly correct. Mr. Silas Riley, Accountant, was a most curious animal—a long, gawky, rawboned Yorkshireman, full of the savage self-conceit that blossoms only in the best county in England. Arrogance was a mild word for the mental attitude of Mr. S. Riley. He had worked himself up, after seven years, to a Cashier’s position in a Huddersfield Bank; and all his experience lay among the factories of the North. Perhaps he would have done better on the Bombay side, where they are happy with one-half per cent profits, and money is cheap. He was useless for Upper India and a wheat Province, where a man wants a large head and a touch of imagination if he is to turn out a satisfactory balance-sheet.

He was wonderfully narrow-minded in business, and, being new to the country, had no notion that Indian banking is totally distinct from Home work. Like most clever self-made men, he had much simplicity in his nature; and, somehow or other, had construed the ordinarily polite terms of his letter of engagement into a belief that the Directors had chosen him on account of his special and brilliant talents, and that they set great store by him. This notion grew and crystallised; thus adding to his natural North-country conceit. Further, he was delicate, suffered from some trouble in his chest, and was short in his temper.

You will admit that Reggie had reason to call his new Accountant a Natural Curiosity. The two men failed to hit it off at all. Riley considered Reggie a wild, feather-headed idiot, given to Heaven only knew what dissipation in low places called ‘Messes,’ and totally unfit for the serious and solemn vocation of banking. He could never get over Reggie’s look of youth and ‘you-bedamned’ air; and he couldn’t understand Reggie’s friends—clean-built, careless men in the Army—who rode over to big Sunday breakfasts at the Bank, and told sultry stories till Riley got up and left the room. Riley was always showing Reggie how the business ought to be conducted, and Reggie had more than once to remind him that seven years’ limited experience between Huddersfield and Beverley did not qualify a man to steer a big up-country business. Then Riley sulked, and referred to himself as a pillar of the Bank and a cherished friend of the Directors, and Reggie tore his hair. If a man’s English subordinates fail him in India, he comes to a hard time indeed, for native help has strict limitations. In the winter Riley went sick for weeks at a time with his lung complaint, and this threw more work on Reggie. But he preferred it to the everlasting friction when Riley was well.

One of the Travelling Inspectors of the Bank discovered these collapses and reported them to the Directors. Now Riley had been foisted on the Bank by an M.P., who wanted the support of Riley’s father who, again, was anxious to get his son out to a warmer climate because of those lungs. The M.P. had an interest in the Bank; but one of the Directors wanted to advance a nominee of his own; and, after Riley’s father had died, he made the rest of the Board see that an Accountant who was sick for half the year had better give place to a healthy man. If Riley had known the real story of his appointment he might have behaved better; but, knowing nothing, his stretches of sickness alternated with restless, persistent, meddling irritation of Reggie, and all the hundred ways in which conceit in a subordinate situation can find play. Reggie used to call him striking and hair-curling names behind his back as a relief to his own feelings; but he never abused him to his face, because he said, ‘Riley is such a frail beast that half of his loathsome conceit is due to pains in the chest.’

Late one April, Riley went very sick indeed. The Doctor punched him and thumped him, and told him he would be better before long. Then the Doctor went to Reggie and said—‘Do you know how sick your Accountant is?’—‘No!’ said Reggie; ‘the worse the better, confound him! He’s a clacking nuisance when he’s well. I’ll let you take away the Bank Safe if you can drug him silent for this hot weather.’

But the Doctor did not laugh—‘Man, I’m not joking,’ he said. ‘I’ll give him another three months in his bed and a week or so more to die in. On my honour and reputation that’s all the grace he has in this world. Consumption has hold of him to the marrow.’

Reggie’s face changed at once into the face of ‘Mr. Reginald Burke,’ and he answered, ‘What can I do?’-‘Nothing,’ said the Doctor; ‘for all practical purposes the man is dead already. Keep him quiet and cheerful, and tell him he’s going to recover. That’s all. I’ll look after him to the end, of course.’

The Doctor went away, and Reggie sat down to open the evening mail. His first letter was one from the Directors, intimating for his information that Mr. Riley was to resign, under a month’s notice, by the terms of his agreement, telling Reggie that their letter to Riley would follow, and advising Reggie of the coming of a new Accountant, a man whom Reggie knew and liked.

Reggie lit a cheroot, and, before he had finished smoking, he had sketched the outline of a fraud. He put away—burked—the Directors’ letter, and went in to talk to Riley, who was as ungracious as usual, and fretting himself over the way the Bank would run during his illness. He never thought of the extra work on Reggie’s shoulders, but solely of the damage to his own prospects of advancement. Then Reggie assured him that everything would be well, and that he, Reggie, would confer with Riley daily on the management of the Bank. Riley was a little soothed, but he hinted in as many words that he did not think much of Reggie’s business capacity. Reggie was humble. And he had letters in his desk from the Directors that a Gilbarte or a Hardie might have been proud of!

The days passed in the big darkened house, and the Directors’ letter of dismissal to Riley came and was put away by Reggie, who, every evening, brought the books to Riley’s room, and showed him what had been going forward, while Riley snarled. Reggie did his best to make statements pleasing to Riley, but the Accountant was sure that the Bank was going to rack and ruin without him. In June, as the lying in bed told on his spirit, he asked whether his absence had been noted by the Directors, and Reggie said that they had written most sympathetic letters, hoping that he would be able to resume his valuable services before long. He showed Riley the letters; and Riley said that the Directors ought to have written to him direct. A few days later, Reggie opened Riley’s mail in the half-light of the room, and gave him the sheet—not the envelope—of a letter to Riley from the Directors. Riley said he would thank Reggie not to interfere with his private papers, specially as Reggie knew he was too weak to open his own letters. Reggie apologised.

Then Riley’s mood changed, and he lectured Reggie on his evil ways: his horses and his bad friends. ‘Of course lying here, on my back, Mr. Burke, I can’t keep you straight; but when I’m well, I do hope you’ll pay some heed to my words.’ Reggie, who had dropped polo, and dinners, and tennis and all, to attend to Riley, said that he was penitent, and settled Riley’s head on the pillow, and heard him fret and contradict in hard, dry, hacking whispers, without a sign of impatience. This, at the end of a heavy day’s office work, doing double duty, in the latter half of June.

When the new Accountant came, Reggie told him the facts of the case, and announced to Riley that he had a guest staying with him. Riley said that he might have had more consideration than to entertain his ‘doubtful friends’ at such a time. Reggie made Carron, the new Accountant, sleep at the Club in consequence. Carron’s arrival took some of the heavy work off his shoulders, and he had time to attend to Riley’s exactions—to explain, soothe, invent, and settle and re-settle the poor wretch in bed, and to forge complimentary letters from Calcutta. At the end of the first month Riley wished to send some money home to his mother. Reggie sent the draft. At the end of the second month Riley’s salary came in just the same. Reggie paid it out of his own pocket, and, with it, wrote Riley a beautiful letter from the Directors.

Riley was very ill indeed, but the flame of his life burnt unsteadily. Now and then he would be cheerful and confident about the future, sketching plans for going Home and seeing his mother. Reggie listened patiently when the office-work was over, and encouraged him.

At other times Riley insisted on Reggie reading the Bible and grim ‘Methody’ tracts to him. Out of these tracts he pointed morals directed at his Manager. But he always found time to worry Reggie about the working of the Bank, and to show him where the weak points lay.

This indoor, sickroom life and constant strain wore Reggie down a good deal, and shook his nerves, and lowered his billiard play by forty points. But the business of the Bank, and the business of the sickroom, had to go on, though the glass was 116º in the shade.

At the end of the third month Riley was sinking fast, and had begun to realise that he was very sick. But the conceit that made him worry Reggie kept him from believing the worst. ‘He wants some sort of mental stimulant if he is to drag on,’ said the Doctor. ‘Keep him interested in life if you care about his living.’ So Riley, contrary to all the laws of business and finance, received a 25-per-cent rise of salary from the Directors. The ‘mental stimulant’ succeeded beautifully. Riley was happy and cheerful, and, as is often the case in consumption, healthiest in mind when the body was weakest. He lingered for a full month, snarling and fretting about the Bank, talking of the future, hearing the Bible read, lecturing Reggie on sin, and wondering when he would be able to move abroad.

But at the end of September, one mercilessly hot evening, he rose up in his bed with a little gasp, and said quickly to Reggie—‘Mr. Burke, I am going to die. I know it in myself. My chest is all hollow inside, and there’s nothing to breathe with. To the best of my knowledge I have done nowt’—he was returning to the talk of his boyhood—‘to lie heavy on my conscience. God be thanked, I have been preserved from the grosser forms of sin; and I counsel you, Mr. Burke . . .’

Here his voice died down, and Reggie stooped over him.

‘Send my salary for September to my Mother . . . done great things with the Bank if I had been spared . . . mistaken policy . . . no fault of mine . . . .’

Then he turned his face to the wall and died.

Reggie drew the sheet over Its face, and went out into the verandah, with his last ‘mental stimulant’—a letter of condolence and sympathy from the Directors—unused in his pocket.

‘If I’d been only ten minutes earlier,’ thought Reggie, ‘I might have heartened him up to pull through another day.’

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DAN had come to grief over his Latin, and was kept in; so Una went alone to Far Wood. Dan’s big catapult and the lead bullets that Hobden had made for him were hidden in an old hollow beech-stub on the west of the wood. They had named the place out of the verse in Lays of Ancient Rome.

From lordly Volaterrae,
Where scowls the far-famed hold,
Piled by the hands of giants
For Godlike Kings of old.

They were the ‘Godlike Kings,’ and when old Hobden piled some comfortable brushwood between the big wooden knees of Volaterrae, they called him ‘Hands of Giants.’

Una slipped through their private gap in the fence, and sat still awhile, scowling as scowlily and lordlily as she knew how; for ‘Volaterrae’ is an important watch-tower that juts out of Far Wood just as Far Wood juts out of the hillside. Pook’s Hill lay below her, and all the turns of the brook as it wanders out of the Willingford Woods, between hop-gardens, to old Hobden’s cottage at the Forge. The Sou’-West wind (there is always a wind by Volaterrae) blew from the bare ridge where Cherry Clack Windmill stands.

Now wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen, and that is why on blowy days you stand up in Volaterrae and shout bits of the Lays to suit its noises.

Una took Dan’s catapult from its secret place, and made ready to meet Lars Porsena’s army stealing through the wind-whitened aspens by the brook. A gust boomed up the valley, and Una chanted sorrowfully:

‘Verbenna down to Ostia
Hath wasted all the plain;
Astur hath stormed Janiculum,
And the stout guards are slain.’

But the wind, not charging fair to the wood, started aside and shook a single oak in Gleason’s pasture. Here it made itself all small and crouched among the grasses, waving the tips of them as a cat waves the tip of her tail before she springs.

‘Now welcome—welcome, Sextus,’ sang Una, loading the catapult—

‘Now welcome to thy home!
Why dost thou stay, and turn away?
Here lies the road to Rome.’

She fired into the face of the lull, to wake up the cowardly wind, and heard a grunt from behind a thorn in the pasture.

‘Oh, my Winkie!’ she said aloud, and that was something she had picked up from Dan. ‘I b’lieve I’ve tickled up a Gleason cow.’

‘You little painted beast!’ a voice cried. ‘I’ll teach you to sling your masters!’

She looked down most cautiously, and saw a young man covered with hoopy bronze armour all glowing among the late broom. But what Una admired beyond all was his great bronze helmet with a red horse-tail that flicked in the wind. She could hear the long hairs rasp on his shimmery shoulder-plates.

‘What does the Faun mean,’ he said, half aloud to himself, ‘by telling me the Painted People have changed?’ He caught sight of Una’s yellow head. ‘Have you seen a painted lead-slinger?’ he called.

‘No-o,’ said Una. ‘But if you’ve seen a bullet—’

‘Seen?’ cried the man. ‘It passed within a hair’s-breadth of my ear.’

‘Well, that was me. I’m most awfully sorry.’

‘Didn’t the Faun tell you I was coming?’ He smiled.

‘Not if you mean Puck. I thought you were a Gleason cow. I—I didn’t know you were a—a—— What are you?’

He laughed outright, showing a set of splendid teeth. His face and eyes were dark, and his eyebrows met above his big nose in one bushy black bar.

‘They call me Parnesius. I have been a Centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion—the Ulpia Victrix. Did you sling that bullet?’

‘I did. I was using Dan’s catapult,’ said Una.

‘Catapults!’ said he. ‘I ought to know something about them. Show me!’

He leaped the rough fence with a rattle of spear, shield, and armour, and hoisted himself into Volaterrae as quickly as a shadow.

‘A sling on a forked stick. I understand!’ he cried, and pulled at the elastic. ‘But what wonderful beast yields this stretching leather?’

‘It’s laccy—elastic. You put the bullet into that loop, and then you pull hard.’

The man pulled, and hit himself square on his thumb-nail.

‘Each to his own weapon,’ he said, gravely, handing it back. ‘I am better with the bigger machine, little maiden. But it’s a pretty toy. A wolf would laugh at it. Aren’t you afraid of wolves?’

‘There aren’t any,’ said Una.

‘Never believe it! A wolf’s like a Winged Hat. He comes when he isn’t expected. Don’t they hunt wolves here?’

‘We don’t hunt,’ said Una, remembering what she had heard from grown-ups. ‘We preserve—pheasants. Do you know them?’

page 2

‘I ought to,’ said the young man, smiling again, and he imitated the cry of the cock-pheasant so perfectly that a bird answered out of the wood.

‘What a big painted clucking fool is a pheasant,’ he said. ‘Just like some Romans!’

‘But you’re a Roman yourself, aren’t you?’ said Una.

‘Ye-es and no. I’m one of a good few thousands who have never seen Rome except in a picture. My people have lived at Vectis for generations. Vectis. That island West yonder that you can see from so far in clear weather.’

‘Do you mean the Isle of Wight? It lifts up just before rain, and you see it from the Downs.’

‘Very likely. Our Villa’s on the South edge of the Island, by the Broken Cliffs. Most of it is three hundred years old, but the cow-stables, where our first ancestor lived, must be a hundred years older. Oh, quite that, because the founder of our family had his land given him by Agricola at the Settlement. It’s not a bad little place for its size. In spring-time violets grow down to the very beach. I’ve gathered sea-weeds for myself and violets for my Mother many a time with our old nurse.’

‘Was your nurse a—a Romaness too?’

‘No, a Numidian. Gods be good to her! A dear, fat, brown thing with a tongue like a cowbell. She was a free woman. By the way, are you free, maiden?’

‘Oh, quite,’ said Una. ‘At least, till tea-time; and in summer our governess doesn’t say much if we’re late.’

The young man laughed again—a proper understanding laugh.

‘I see,’ said he. ‘That accounts for your being in the wood. We hid among the cliffs.’

‘Did you have a governess, then?’

‘Did we not? A Greek, too. She had a way of clutching her dress when she hunted us among the gorse-bushes that made us laugh. Then she’d say she’d get us whipped. She never did, though, bless her! Aglaia was a thorough sportswoman, for all her learning.’

‘But what lessons did you do—when—when you were little?’

‘Ancient history, the Classics, arithmetic, and so on,’ he answered. ‘My sister and I were thickheads, but my two brothers (I’m the middle one) liked those things, and, of course, Mother was clever enough for any six. She was nearly as tall as I am, and she looked like the new statue on the Western Road—the Demeter of the Baskets, you know. And funny! Roma Dea ! How Mother could make us laugh!’

‘What at?’

‘Little jokes and sayings that every family has. Don’t you know?’

‘I know we have, but I didn’t know other people had them too,’ said Una. ‘Tell me about all your family, please.’

‘Good families are very much alike. Mother would sit spinning of evenings while Aglaia read in her corner, and Father did accounts, and we four romped about the passages. When our noise grew too loud the Pater would say, “Less tumult! Less tumult! Have you never heard of a Father’s right over his children? He can slay them, my loves—slay them dead, and the Gods highly approve of the action!” Then Mother would prim up her dear mouth over the wheel and answer: “H’m! I’m afraid there can’t be much of the Roman Father about you!” Then the Pater would roll up his accounts, and say, “I’ll show you!” and then—then, he’d be worse than any of us!’

‘Fathers can—if they like,’ said Una, her eyes dancing.

‘Didn’t I say all good families are very much the same?’

‘What did you do in summer?’ said Una. ‘Play about, like us?’

‘Yes, and we visited our friends. There are no wolves in Vectis. We had many friends, and as many ponies as we wished.’

‘It must have been lovely,’ said Una. ‘I hope it lasted for ever.’

‘Not quite, little maid. When I was about sixteen or seventeen, the Father felt gouty, and we all went to the Waters.’

‘What waters?’

‘At Aquae Sulis. Every one goes there. You ought to get your Father to take you some day.’

‘But where? I don’t know,’ said Una.

The young man looked astonished for a moment. ‘Aquae Sulis,’ he repeated. ‘The best baths in Britain. Just as good, I’m told, as Rome. All the old gluttons sit in hot water, and talk scandal and politics. And the Generals come through the streets with their guards behind them; and the magistrates come in their chairs with their stiff guards behind them; and you meet fortune-tellers, and goldsmiths, and merchants, and philosophers, and feather-sellers, and ultra-Roman Britons, and ultra-British Romans, and tame tribesmen pretending to be civilised, and Jew lecturers, and—oh, everybody interesting. We young people, of course, took no interest in politics. We had not the gout: there were many of our age like us. We did not find life sad.

‘But while we were enjoying ourselves without thinking, my sister met the son of a magistrate in the west—and a year afterwards she was married to him. My young brother, who was always interested in plants and roots, met the First Doctor of a Legion from the City of the Legions, and he decided that he would be an Army doctor. I do not think it is a profession for a well-born man, but then—I’m not my brother. He went to Rome to study medicine, and now he’s First Doctor of a Legion in Egypt—at Antinoe, I think, but I have not heard from him for some time.

‘My eldest brother came across a Greek philosopher, and told my Father that he intended to settle down on the estate as a farmer and a philosopher. You see’—the young man’s eyes twinkled—’his philosopher was a long-haired one!’

I‘ thought philosophers were bald,’ said Una.

page 3

‘Not all. She was very pretty. I don’t blame him. Nothing could have suited me better than my eldest brother doing this, for I was only too keen to join the Army. I had always feared I should have to stay at home and look after the estate while my brother took this.’

He rapped on his great glistening shield that never seemed to be in his way.

‘So we were well contented—we young people—and we rode back to Clausentum along the Wood Road very quietly. But when we reached home, Aglaia, our governess, saw what had come to us. I remember her at the door, the torch over her head, watching us climb the cliff path from the boat. “Aie! Aie!” she said. “Children you went away. Men and a woman you return!” Then she kissed Mother, and Mother wept. Thus our visit to the Waters settled our fates for each of us, Maiden.’

He rose to his feet and listened, leaning on the shield-rim.

‘I think that’s Dan—my brother,’ said Una.

‘Yes; and the Faun is with him,’ he replied, as Dan with Puck stumbled through the copse.

‘We should have come sooner,’ Puck called, ‘but the beauties of your native tongue, O Parnesius, have enthralled this young citizen.’

Parnesius looked bewildered, even when Una explained.

‘Dan said the plural of “dominus” was “dominoes,” and when Miss Blake said it wasn’t he said he supposed it was “backgammon,” and so he had to write it out twice—for cheek, you know.’

Dan had climbed into Volaterrae, hot and panting.

‘I’ve run nearly all the way,’ he gasped, ‘and then Puck met me. How do you do, Sir?’

‘I am in good health,’ Parnesius answered. ‘See! I have tried to bend the bow of Ulysses, but——’ He held up his thumb.

‘I’m sorry. You must have pulled off too soon,’ said Dan. ‘But Puck said you were telling Una a story.’

‘Continue, O Parnesius,’ said Puck, who had perched himself on a dead branch above them. ‘I will be chorus. Has he puzzled you much, Una?’

‘Not a bit, except—I didn’t know where Ak—Ak something was,’ she answered.

‘Oh, Aquae Sulis. That’s Bath, where the buns come from. Let the hero tell his own tale.’

Parnesius pretended to thrust his spear at Puck’s legs, but Puck reached down, caught at the horse-tail plume, and pulled off the tall helmet.

‘Thanks, jester,’ said Parnesius, shaking his curly dark head. ‘That is cooler. Now hang it up for me . . . .

‘I was telling your sister how I joined the Army,’ he said to Dan.

‘Did you have to pass an Exam?’ Dan asked, eagerly.

‘No. I went to my Father, and said I should like to enter the Dacian Horse (I had seen some at Aquae Sulis); but he said I had better begin service in a regular Legion from Rome. Now, like many of our youngsters, I was not too fond of anything Roman. The Roman-born officers and magistrates looked down on us British-born as though we were barbarians. I told my Father so.

‘“I know they do,” he said; “but remember, after all, we are the people of the Old Stock, and our duty is to the Empire.”

‘“To which Empire?” I asked. “We split the Eagle before I was born.”

‘“What thieves’ talk is that?” said my Father. He hated slang.

‘“Well, Sir,” I said, “we’ve one Emperor in Rome, and I don’t know how many Emperors the outlying Provinces have set up from time to time. Which am I to follow?”

‘“Gratian,” said he. “At least he’s a sportsman.”

‘“He’s all that,” I said. “Hasn’t he turned himself into a raw-beef-eating Scythian?”

‘“Where did you hear of it?” said the Pater.

‘“At Aquae Sulis,” I said. It was perfectly true. This precious Emperor Gratian of ours had a bodyguard of fur-cloaked Scythians, and he was so crazy about them that he dressed like them. In Rome of all places in the world! It was as bad as if my own Father had painted himself blue!

‘“No matter for the clothes,” said the Pater. “They are only the fringe of the trouble. It began before your time or mine. Rome has forsaken her Gods, and must be punished. The great war with the Painted People broke out in the very year the temples of our Gods were destroyed. We beat the Painted People in the very year our temples were rebuilt. Go back further still.” . . . He went back to the time of Diocletian; and to listen to him you would have thought Eternal Rome herself was on the edge of destruction, just because a few people had become a little large-minded.

‘I knew nothing about it. Aglaia never taught us the history of our own country. She was so full of her ancient Greeks.

‘“There is no hope for Rome,’ said the Pater, at last. ‘She has forsaken her Gods, but if the Gods forgive us here, we may save Britain. To do that, we must keep the Painted People back. Therefore, I tell you, Parnesius, as a Father, that if your heart is set on service, your place is among men on the Wall—and not with women among the cities.”’

‘What Wall?’ asked Dan and Una at once.

‘Father meant the one we call Hadrian’s Wall. I’ll tell you about it later. It was built long ago, across North Britain, to keep out the Painted People—Picts you call them. Father had fought in the great Pict War that lasted more than twenty years, and he knew what fighting meant. Theodosius, one of our great Generals, had chased the little beasts back far into the North before I was born: down at Vectis of course we never troubled our heads about them. But when my Father spoke as he did, I kissed his hand, and waited for orders. We British-born Romans know what is due to our parents.’

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‘If I kissed my Father’s hand, he’d laugh,’ said Dan.

‘Customs change; but if you do not obey your father, the Gods remember it. You may be quite sure of that.

‘After our talk, seeing I was in earnest, the Pater sent me over to Clausentum to learn my foot-drill in a barrack full of foreign auxiliaries—as unwashed and unshaved a mob of mixed barbarians as ever scrubbed a breastplate. It was your stick in their stomachs and your shield in their faces to push them into any sort of formation. When I had learned my work the Instructor gave me a handful—and they were a handful!—of Gauls and Iberians to polish up till they were sent to their stations up-country. I did my best, and one night a villa in the suburbs caught fire, and I had my handful out and at work before any of the other troops. I noticed a quiet-looking man on the lawn, leaning on a stick. He watched us passing buckets from the pond; and at last he said to me: “Who are you?”

‘“A probationer, waiting for a command,” I answered. I didn’t know who he was from Deucalion!’

‘“Born in Britain?” he said.

‘“Yes, if you were born in Spain,” I said, for he neighed his words like an Iberian mule.

‘“And what might you call yourself when you are at home?” he said, laughing.

‘“That depends,” I answered; “sometimes one thing and sometimes another. But now I’m busy.”

‘He said no more till we had saved the family gods (they were respectable householders), and then he grunted across the laurels: “Listen, young sometimes-one-thing-and-sometimes-another. In future call yourself Centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth, the Ulpia Victrix. That will help me to remember you. Your Father and a few other people call me Maximus.”

‘He tossed me the polished stick he was leaning on, and went away. You might have knocked me down with it!’

‘Who was he?’ said Dan.

‘Maximus himself, our great General! The General of Britain who had been Theodosius’s right hand in the Pict War! Not only had he given me my Centurion’s stick direct, but three steps in a good Legion as well! A new man generally begins in the Tenth Cohort of his Legion, and works up.’

‘And were you pleased?’ said Una.

‘Very. I thought Maximus had chosen me for my good looks and fine style in marching, but, when I went home, the Pater told me he had served under Maximus in the great Pict War, and had asked him to befriend me.’

‘A child you were!’ said Puck, from above.

‘I was,’ said Parnesius. ‘Don’t begrudge it me, Faun. Afterwards—the Gods know I put aside the games!’ And Puck nodded, brown chin on brown hand, his big eyes still.

‘The night before I left we sacrificed to our ancestors—the usual little Home Sacrifice—but I never prayed so earnestly to all the Good Shades, and then I went with my Father by boat to Regnum, and across the chalk eastwards to Anderida yonder.’

‘Regnum? Anderida?’ The children turned their faces to Puck.

‘Regnum’s Chichester,’ he said, pointing towards Cherry Clack, and—he threw his arm South behind him—‘Anderida’s Pevensey.’

‘Pevensey again!’ said Dan. ‘Where Weland landed?’

‘Weland and a few others,’ said Puck. ‘Pevensey isn’t young—even compared to me!’

‘The headquarters of the Thirtieth lay at Anderida in summer, but my own Cohort, the Seventh, was on the Wall up North. Maximus was inspecting Auxiliaries—the Abulci, I think—at Anderida, and we stayed with him, for he and my Father were very old friends. I was only there ten days when I was ordered to go up with thirty men to my Cohort.’ He laughed merrily. ‘A man never forgets his first march. I was happier than any Emperor when I led my handful through the North Gate of the Camp, and we saluted the guard and the Altar of Victory there.’

‘How? How?’ said Dan and Una.

Parnesius smiled, and stood up, flashing in his armour.

‘So!’ said he; and he moved slowly through the beautiful movements of the Roman Salute, that ends with a hollow clang of the shield coming into its place between the shoulders.

‘Hai!’ said Puck. ‘That sets one thinking!’

‘We went out fully armed,’ said Parnesius, sitting down; ‘but as soon as the road entered the Great Forest, my men expected the pack-horses to hang their shields on. “No!” I said; “you can dress like women in Anderida, but while you’re with me you will carry your own weapons and armour.”

‘“But it’s hot,” said one of them, “and we haven’t a doctor. Suppose we get sunstroke, or a fever?”

‘“Then die,” I said, “and a good riddance to Rome! Up shield—up spears, and tighten your foot-wear!”

‘“Don’t think yourself Emperor of Britain already,” a fellow shouted. I knocked him over with the butt of my spear, and explained to these Roman-born Romans that, if there were any further trouble, we should go on with one man short. And, by the Light of the Sun, I meant it too! My raw Gauls at Clausentum had never treated me so.

‘Then, quietly as a cloud, Maximus rode out of the fern (my Father behind him), and reined up across the road. He wore the Purple, as though he were already Emperor; his leggings were of white buckskin laced with gold.

‘My men dropped like—like partridges.

‘He said nothing for some time, only looked, with his eyes puckered. Then he crooked his forefinger, and my men walked—crawled, I mean—to one side.

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‘“Stand in the sun, children,” he said, and they formed up on the hard road.

‘“What would you have done,” he said to me, “if I had not been here?”

‘“I should have killed that man,” I answered.

‘“Kill him now,” he said. “He will not move a limb.”

‘“No,” I said. “You’ve taken my men out of my command. I should only be your butcher if I killed him now.” Do you see what I meant?’ Parnesius turned to Dan.

‘Yes,’ said Dan. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair, somehow.’

‘That was what I thought,’ said Parnesius.

But Maximus frowned. “You’ll never be an Emperor,” he said. “Not even a General will you be.”

‘I was silent, but my Father seemed pleased.

‘“I came here to see the last of you,” he said.

‘“You have seen it,” said Maximus. “I shall never need your son any more. He will live and he will die an officer of a Legion—and he might have been Prefect of one of my Provinces. Now eat and drink with us,” he said. “Your men will wait till you have finished.”

‘My miserable thirty stood like wine-skins glistening in the hot sun, and Maximus led us to where his people had set a meal. Himself he mixed the wine.

‘“A year from now,” he said, “you will remember that you have sat with the Emperor of Britain—and Gaul.”

‘“Yes,” said the Pater, “you can drive two mules—Gaul and Britain.”

‘“Five years hence you will remember that you have drunk”—he passed me the cup and there was blue borage in it—“with the Emperor of Rome!”

‘“No; you can’t drive three mules; they will tear you in pieces,” said my Father.

‘“And you on the Wall, among the heather, will weep because your notion of justice was more to you than the favour of the Emperor of Rome.”

‘I sat quite still. One does not answer a General who wears the Purple.

‘“I am not angry with you,” he went on; “I owe too much to your Father——”

‘“You owe me nothing but advice that you never took,” said the Pater.

‘“——to be unjust to any of your family. Indeed, I say you may make a good Tribune, but, so far as I am concerned, on the Wall you will live, and on the Wall you will die,” said Maximus.

‘“Very like,” said my Father. “But we shall have the Picts and their friends breaking through before long. You cannot move all troops out of Britain to make you Emperor, and expect the North to sit quiet.”

‘“I follow my destiny,” said Maximus.

‘“Follow it, then,” said my Father, pulling up a fern root; “and die as Theodosius died.”

‘“Ah!” said Maximus. “My old General was killed because he served the Empire too well. I may be killed, but not for that reason,” and he smiled a little pale grey smile that made my blood run cold.

‘“Then I had better follow my destiny,” I said, “and take my men to the Wall.”

‘He looked at me a long time, and bowed his head slanting like a Spaniard. “Follow it, boy,” he said. That was all. I was only too glad to get away, though I had many messages for home. I found my men standing as they had been put—they had not even shifted their feet in the dust, and off I marched, still feeling that terrific smile like an east wind up my back. I never halted them till sunset, and’—he turned about and looked at Pook’s Hill below him—‘then I halted yonder.’ He pointed to the broken, bracken covered shoulder of the Forge Hill behind old Hobden’s cottage.

‘There? Why, that’s only the old Forge where they made iron once,’ said Dan.

‘Very good stuff it was too,’ said Parnesius, calmly. ‘We mended three shoulder-straps here and had a spear-head riveted. The Forge was rented from the Government by a one-eyed smith from Carthage. I remember we called him Cyclops. He sold me a beaver-skin rug for my sister’s room.’

‘But it couldn’t have been here,’ Dan insisted.

‘But it was! From the Altar of Victory at Anderida to the First Forge in the Forest here is twelve miles seven hundred paces. It is all in the Road Book. A man doesn’t forget his first march. I think I could tell you every station between this and——’ He leaned forward, but his eye was caught by the setting sun.

It had come down to the top of Cherry Clack Hill, and the light poured in between the tree trunks so that you could see red and gold and black deep into the heart of Far Wood; and Parnesius in his armour shone as though he had been afire.

‘Wait,’ he said, lifting a hand, and the sunlight jinked on his glass bracelet. ‘Wait! I pray to Mithras!’

He rose and stretched his arms westward, with deep, splendid-sounding words.

Then Puck began to sing too, in a voice like bells tolling, and as he sang he slipped from Volaterrae to the ground, and beckoned the children to follow. They obeyed; it seemed as though the voices were pushing them along; and through the goldy-brown light on the beech leaves they walked, while Puck between them chanted something like this:

page 6

‘Cur mundus militat sub vana gloria
Cujus prosperitas est transitoria?
Tam cito labitur ejus potentia
Quam vasa figuli quæ sunt fragilia.’

They found themselves at the little locked gates of the wood.

‘Quo Cæsar abiit celsus imperio?
Vel Dives splendidus totus in prandio?
Dic ubi Tullius——’

Still singing, he took Dan’s hand and wheeled him round to face Una as she came out of the gate. It shut behind her, at the same time as Puck threw the memory-magicking Oak, Ash, and Thorn leaves over their heads.

‘Well, you are jolly late,’ said Una. ‘Couldn’t you get away before?’

‘I did,’ said Dan. ‘I got away in lots of time, but—but I didn’t know it was so late. Where’ve you been?’

‘In Volaterrae—waiting for you.’

‘Sorry,’ said Dan. ‘It was all that beastly Latin.’

[a short tale]

TWO awful catastrophes have occurred. One Englishman in London is dead, and I have scandalised about twenty of his nearest and dearest friends. He was a man nearly seventy years old, engaged in the business of an architect, and immensely respected. That was all I knew about him till I began to circulate among his friends in these parts, trying to cheer them up and make them forget the fog.

“Hush!” said a man and his wife. “Don’t you know he died yesterday of a sudden attack of pneumonia? Isn’t it shocking?”

“Yes,” said I vaguely. “Aw’fly shocking. Has he left his wife provided for?”

“Oh, he’s very well off indeed, and his wife is quite old. But just think—it was only in the next street it happened!” Then I saw that their grief was not for Strangeways, deceased, but for themselves.

“How old was he?” I said.

“Nearly seventy, or maybe a little over.”

“About time for a man to rationally expect such a thing as death,” I thought, and went away to another house, where a young married couple lived.

“Isn’t it perfectly ghastly?” said the wife. “Mr. Strangeways died last night.”

“So I heard,” said I. “Well, he had lived his life.”

“Yes, but it was such a shockingly short illness. Why, only three weeks ago he was walking about the street.” And she looked nervously at her husband, as though she expected him to give up the ghost at any minute.

Then I gathered, with the knowledge of the length of his sickness, that her grief was not for the late Mr. Strangeways, and went away thinking over men and women I had known who would have given a thousand years in Purgatory for even a week wherein to arrange their affairs, and who were anything but well off.

I passed on to a third house full of children, and the shadow of death hung over their heads, for father and mother were talking of Mr. Strangeway’s “end.” “Most shocking,” said they. “It seems that his wife was in the next room when he was dying, and his only son called her, so she just had time to take him in her arms before he died. He was unconscious at the last. Wasn’t it awful?”

When I went away from that house I thought of men and women without a week wherein to arrange their affairs, and without any money, who were anything but unconscious at the last, and who would have given a thousand years in Purgatory for one glimpse at their mothers, their wives or their husbands. I reflected how these people died tended by hirelings and strangers, and I was not in the least ashamed to say that I laughed over Mr. Strangeways’ death as I entered the house of a brother in his craft.

“Heard of Strangeways’ death?” said he. “Most hideous thing. Why, he had only a few days before got news of his designs being accepted by the Burgoyne Cathedral. If he had lived he would have been working out the deails now—with me.” And I saw that this man’s fear also was not on account of Mr. Strangeways. And I thought of men and women who had died in the midst of wrecked work; then I sought a company of young men and heard them talk of the dead. “That’s the second death among people I know within the year,” said one. “Yes, the second death,” said another.

I smiled a very large smile.

“And you know,” said a third, who was the oldest of the party, “they’ve opened the new road by the head of Tresillion Road, and the wind blows straight across that level square from the Parks. Everything is changing about us.”

“He was an old man,” I said.

“Ye-es. More than middle-aged,” said they.

“And he outlived his reputation?”

“Oh, no, or how would he have taken the designs for the Burgoyne Cathedral? Why, the very day he died . . . ”

“Yes,” said I. “He died at the end of a completed work—his design finished, his prize awarded?”

“Yes; but he didn’t live to . . . ”

“And his illness lasted seventeen days, of twenty-four hours each?”

“Yes.”

“And he was tended by his own kith and Mn, dying with his head on his wife’s breast, his hand in his only son’s hand, without any thought of their possible poverty to vex him. Are these things so?”

“Ye-es,” said they. “Wasn’t it shocking?”

“Shocking?” I said. “Get out of this place. Go forth, run about and see what death really means. You have described such dying as a god might envy and a king might pay half his ransom to make certain of. Wait till you have seen men—strong men of thirty-five, with little children, die at two days’ notice, penniless and alone, and seen it not once, but twenty times; wait till you have seen the young girl die within a fortnight of the wedding; or the lover within three days of his marriage; or the mother—sixty little minutes—before her son can come to her side; wait till you hesitate before handling your daily newspaper for fear of reading of the death of some young man that you have dined with, drank with, shot with, lent money to and borrowed money from, and tested to the uttermost—till you dare not hope for the death of an old man, but, when you are strongest, count up the tale of your acquaintances and friends, wondering how many will be alive six months hence. Wait till you have heard men calling in the death hour on kin that cannot come; till you have dined with a man one night and seen him buried on the next. Then you can begin to whimper about loneliness and change and desolation.” Here I foamed at the mouth.

“And do you mean to say,” drawled a young gentleman, “that there is any society in which that sort of holocaust goes on?”

“I do,” said I. “It’s not society; it’s Life,” And they laughed.

But this is the old tale of Pharaoh’s chariot-wheel and flying-fish.

If I tell them yarns, they say: “How true! How true!” If I try to present the truth, they say: “What superb imagination!”

“But you understand, don’t you?’

“Qui procul hinc—the legend’s writ,
    The frontier grave is far away;
Qui ante diem periit,
    Sed miles, sed pro patriâ.
(NEWBOLT)

THE Easter term was but a month old when Stettson major, a day-boy, contracted diphtheria, and the Head was very angry. He decreed a new and narrower set of bounds—the infection had been traced to an out-lying farmhouse—urged the prefects severely to lick all trespassers, and promised extra attentions from his own hand. There were no words bad enough for Stettson major, quarantined at his mother’s house, who had lowered the school-average of health. This he said in the gymnasium after prayers. Then he wrote some two hundred letters to as many anxious parents and guardians, and bade the school carry on. The trouble did not spread, but, one night, a dog-cart drove to the Head’s door, and in the morning the Head had gone, leaving all things in charge of Mr. King, senior house-master. The Head often ran up to town, where the school devoutly believed he bribed officials for early proofs of the Army Examination papers; but this absence was unusually prolonged.

‘Downy old bird!’ said Stalky to the allies, one wet afternoon, in the study. ‘He must have gone on a bend an’ been locked up, under a false name.’

‘What for?’ Beetle entered joyously into the libel.

‘Forty shillin’s or a month for hackin’ the chucker-out of the Pavvy on the shins. Bates always has a spree when he goes to town. ’Wish he was back, though. I’m about sick o’ King’s “whips an’ scorpions” an’ lectures on public-school spirit—yah!—and scholarship!’

‘“Crass an’ materialised brutality of the middle-classes—readin’ solely for marks. Not a scholar in the whole school,”’ M‘Turk quoted, pensively boring holes in the mantelpiece with a hot poker.

‘That’s rather a sickly way of spending an afternoon. ’Stinks, too. Let’s come out an’ smoke. Here’s a treat.’ Stalky held up a long Indian cheroot. ‘’Bagged it from my pater last holidays. I’m a bit shy of it, though; it’s heftier than a pipe. We’ll smoke it palaver-fashion. Hand it round, eh? Let’s lie up behind the old harrow on the Monkey-farm Road.’

‘Out of bounds. Bounds beastly strict these days, too. Besides, we shall cat.’ Beetle sniffed the cheroot critically. ‘It’s a regular Pomposo Stinkadore

‘You can; I shan’t. What d’you say, Turkey?’

‘Oh, may’s well, I s’pose.’

‘Chuck on your cap, then. It’s two to one, Beetle. Hout you come!’

They saw a group of boys by the notice-board in the corridor; little Foxy, the school sergeant, among them.

‘More bounds, I expect,’ said Stalky. ‘Hullo, Foxibus, who are you in mournin’ for?’ There was a broad band of crape round Foxy’s arm.

‘He was in my old regiment,’ said Foxy, jerking his head towards the notices, where a newspaper cutting was thumb-tacked between call-over lists.

‘By gum!’ quoth Stalky, uncovering as he read. ‘It’s old Duncan—Fat-Sow Duncan—killed on duty at something or other Kotal. “Rallyin’ his men with conspicuous gallantry.” He would, of course. “The body was recovered.” That’s all right. they cut ’em up sometimes, don’t they, Foxy?’

‘Horrid,’ said the sergeant briefly.

‘Poor old Fat-Sow! I was a fag when he left. How many does that make to us, Foxy?’

‘Mr. Duncan, he is the ninth. He came here when he was no bigger than little Grey tertius. My old regiment, too. Yiss, nine to us, Mr. Corkran, up to date.’

The boys went out into the wet, walking swiftly.

‘’Wonder how it feels—to be shot and all that,’ said Stalky, as they splashed down a lane. ‘Where did it happen, Beetle?’

‘Oh, out in India somewhere. We’re always rowin’ there. But look here, Stalky, what is the good o’ sittin’ under a hedge an’ cattin’? It’s be-eastly cold. It’s be-eastly wet, and we’ll be collared as sure as a gun.’

‘Shut up! Did you ever know your Uncle Stalky get you into a mess yet?’ Like many other leaders, Stalky did not dwell on past defeats.

They pushed through a dripping hedge, landed among water-logged clods, and sat down on a rust-coated harrow. The cheroot burned with sputterings of saltpetre. They smoked it gingerly, each passing to the other between closed forefinger and thumb.

‘Good job we hadn’t one apiece, ain’t it?’ said Stalky, shivering through set teeth. To prove his words he immediately laid all before them, and they followed his example. . . .

‘I told you,’ moaned Beetle, sweating clammy drops. ‘Oh, Stalky, you are a fool!’

‘Fe cat, tu cat, il cat. Nous cattons!’ M‘Turk handed up his contribution and lay hopelessly on the cold iron.

‘Something’s wrong with the beastly thing. I say, Beetle, have you been droppin’ ink on it?’

But Beetle was in no case to answer. Limp and empty, they sprawled across the harrow, the rust marking their ulsters in red squares and the abandoned cheroot-end reeking under their very cold noses. Then—they had heard nothing—the Head himself stood before them—the Head who should have been in town bribing examiners—the Head fantastically attired in old tweeds and a deer-stalker!

‘Ah,’ he said, fingering his moustache. ‘Very good. I might have guessed who it was. You will go back to the College and give my compliments to Mr. King and ask him to give you an extra-special licking. You will then do me five hundred lines. I shall be back to-morrow. Five hundred lines by five o’clock to-morrow. You are also gated for a week. This is not exactly the time for breaking bounds. Extra-special, please.’

page 2

He disappeared over the hedge as lightly as he had come. There was a murmur of women’s voices in the deep lane.

‘Oh, you Prooshian brute!’ said M‘Turk as the voices died away. ‘Stalky, it’s all your silly fault.’

‘Kill him! Kill him!’ gasped Beetle.

‘I ca-an’t. I’m going to cat again . . . I don’t mind that, but King ‘ll gloat over us horrid. Extraspecial, ooh!’

Stalky made no answer—not even a soft one. They went to College and received that for which they had been sent. King enjoyed himself most thoroughly, for by virtue of their seniority the boys were exempt from his hand, save under special order. Luckily, he was no expert in the gentle art.

‘“Strange, how desire both outrun performance,”’ said Beetle irreverently, quoting from some Shakespeare play that they were cramming that term. They regained their study and settled down to the imposition.

‘You’re quite right, Beetle.’ Stalky spoke in silky and propitiating tones. ‘Now if the Head had sent us up to a prefect, we’d have got something to remember!’

‘Look here,’ M‘Turk began with cold venom, ‘we aren’t going to row you about this business, because it’s too bad for a row; but we want you to understand you’re jolly well excommunicated, Stalky. You’re a plain ass.’

‘How was I to know that the Head ’ud collar us? What was he doin’ in those ghastly clothes, too?’

‘Don’t try to raise a side-issue,’ Beetle grunted severely.

‘Well, it was all Stettson major’s fault. If he hadn’t gone an’ got diphtheria ’twouldn’t have happened. But don’t you think it rather rummy—the Head droppin’ on us that way?’

‘Shut up! You’re dead!’ said Beetle. ‘We’ve chopped your spurs off your beastly heels. We’ve cocked your shield upside down, and—and I don’t think you ought to be allowed to brew for a month.

‘Oh, stop jawin’ at me. I want——’

‘Stop? Why—why, we’re gated for a week.’ M‘Turk almost howled as the agony of the situation overcame him. ‘A lickin’ from King, five hundred lines, and a gating. D’you expect us to kiss you, Stalky, you beast?’

‘Drop rottin’ for a minute. I want to find out about the Head bein’ where he was.’

‘Well, you have. You found him quite well and fit. Found him making love to Stettson major’s mother. That was her in the lane—I heard her. And so we were ordered a licking before a day-boy’s mother. Bony old window, too,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Anything else you’d like to find out?’

‘I don’t care. I swear I’ll get even with him some day,’ Stalky growled.

‘’Looks like it,’ said M‘Turk. ‘Extra-special, week’s gatin’ and five hundred . . . and now you’re goin’ to row about it! ‘Help scrag him, Beetle!’ Stalky had thrown his Virgil at them.

The Head returned next day without explantion, to find the lines waiting for him and the school a little relaxed under Mr. King’s viceroyalty. Mr. King had been talking at and round and over the boys’ heads, in a lofty and promiscuous style, of public-school spirit and the traditions of ancient seats; for he always improved an occasion. Beyond waking in two hundred and fifty young hearts a lively hatred of all other foundations, he accomplished little—so little, indeed, that when, two days after the Head’s return, he chanced to come across Stalky & Co., gated but ever resourceful, playing marbles in the corridor, he said that he was not surprised—not in the least surprised. This was what he had expected from persons of their morale.

‘But there isn’t any rule against marbles, sir. Very interestin’ game,’ said Beetle, his knees white with chalk and dust. Then he received two hundred lines for insolence, besides an order to go to the nearest prefect for judgment and slaughter.

This is what happened behind the closed doors of Flint’s study, and Flint was then Head of the Games:—

‘Oh, I say, Flint. King has sent me to you for playin’ marbles in the corridor an’ shoutin’ “alley tor” an’ “knuckle down.”’

‘What does he suppose I have to do with that?’ was the answer.

‘Dunno. Well?’ Beetle grinned wickedly. ‘What am I to tell him? He’s rather wrathy about it.’

‘If the Head chooses to put a notice in the corridor forbiddin’ marbles, I can do something; but I can’t move on a house-master’s report. He knows that as well as I do.’

The sense of this oracle Beetle conveyed, all unsweetened, to King, who hastened to interview Flint.

Now Flint had been seven and a half years at the College, counting six months with a London crammer, from whose roof he had returned, homesick, to the Head for the final Army polish. There were four or five other seniors who had gone through much the same mill, not to mention boys, rejected by other establishments on account of a certain overwhelmingness, whom the Head had wrought into very fair shape. It was not a Sixth to be handled without gloves, as King found.

‘Am I to understand it is your intention to allow board-school games under your study windows, Flint? If so, I can only say——’ He said much, and Flint listened politely.

‘Well, sir, if the Head sees fit to call a prefects’ meeting we are bound to take the matter up. But the tradition of the school is that the prefects can’t move in any matter affecting the whole school without the Head’s direct order.’

Much more was then delivered, both sides a little losing their temper.

After tea, at an informal gathering of prefects in his study, Flint related the adventure.

‘He’s been playin’ for this for a week, and now he’s got it. You know as well as I do that if he hadn’t been gassing at us the way he has, that young devil Beetle wouldn’t have dreamed of marbles.’

‘We know that,’ said Perowne, ‘but that isn’t the question. On Flint’s showin’ King has called the prefects names enough to justify a first-class row. Crammers’ rejections, ill-regulated hobble-de-hoys, wasn’t it? Now it’s impossible for prefects——’

‘Rot,’ said Flint. ‘King’s the best classical cram we’ve got; and ’Tisn’t fair to bother the Head with a row. He’s up to his eyes with extra-tu. and Army work as it is. Besides, as I told King, we aren’t a public school. We’re a limited liability company payin’ four per cent. My father’s a shareholder, too.’

page 3

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ said Venner, a red-headed boy of nineteen.

‘Well, seems to me that we should be interferin’ with ourselves. We’ve got to get into the Army or—get out, haven’t we? King’s hired by the Council to teach us. All the rest’s flumdiddle. Can’t you see?’

It might have been because he felt the air was a little thunderous that the Head took his after-dinner cheroot to Flint’s study; but he so often began an evening in a prefect’s room that nobody suspected when he drifted in politely, after the knocks that etiquette demanded.

‘Prefects’ meeting?’ A cock of one wise eyebrow.

‘Not exactly, sir; we’re just talking things over. Won’t you take the easy chair?’

‘Thanks. Luxurious infants, you are.’ He dropped into Flint’s big half-couch and puffed for a while in silence. ‘Well, since you’re all here, I may confess that I’m the mute with the bowstring.’

The young faces grew serious. The phrase meant that certain of their number would be withdrawn from all further games for extra-tuition. It might also mean future success at Sandhurst; but it was present ruin for the First Fifteen.

‘Yes, I’ve come for my pound of flesh. I ought to have had you out before the Exeter match; but it’s our sacred duty to beat Exeter.’

‘Isn’t the Old Boys’ match sacred, too, sir?’ said Perowne. The Old Boys’ match was the event of the Easter term.

‘We’ll hope they aren’t in training. Now for the list. First I want Flint. It’s the Euclid that does it. You must work deductions with me. Perowne, extra mechanical drawing. Dawson goes to Mr. King for extra Latin, and Venner to me for German. Have I damaged the First Fifteen much?’ He smiled sweetly.

‘Ruined it, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Flint. ‘Can’t you let us off till the end of the term?’

‘Impossible. It will be a tight squeeze for Sandhurst this year.’

‘And all to be cut up by those vile Afghans, too,’ said Dawson. ‘’Wouldn’t think there’d be so much competition, would you?’

‘Oh, that reminds me. Crandall is coming down with the Old Boys—I’ve asked twenty of them, but we shan’t get more than a weak team. I don’t know whether he’ll be much use, though. He was rather knocked about, recovering poor old Duncan’s body.’

‘Crandall major—the Gunner?’ Perowne asked.

‘No, the minor—”Toffee” Crandall—in a native infantry regiment. He was almost before your time, Perowne.’

‘The papers didn’t say anything about him. We read about Fat-Sow, of course. What’s Crandall done, sir?’

‘I’ve brought over an Indian paper that his mother sent me. It was rather a—hefty, I think you say—piece of work. Shall I read it?’

The Head knew how to read. When he had finished the quarter-column of close type everybody thanked him politely.

‘Good for the old Coll.!’ said Perowne. ‘Pity he wasn’t in time to save Fat-Sow, though. That’s nine to us, isn’t it, in the last three years?’

‘Yes . . . And I took old Duncan off all games for extra-tu. five years ago this term,’ said the Head. ‘By the way, who do you hand over the Games to, Flint?’

‘Haven’t thought yet. Who’d you recommend, sir?’

‘No, thank you. I’ve heard it casually hinted behind my back that the Prooshian Bates is a downy bird, but he isn’t going to make himself responsible for a new Head of the Games. Settle it among yourselves. Good-night.’

‘And that’s the man,’ said Flint, when the door shut, ‘that you want to bother with a dame’s school row.’

‘I was only pullin’ your fat leg,’ Perowne returned hastily. ‘You’re so easy to draw, Flint.’

‘Well, never mind that. The Head’s knocked the First Fifteen to bits, and we’ve got to pick up the pieces, or the Old Boys will have a walk-over. Let’s promote all the Second Fifteen and make Big Side play up. There’s heaps of talent somewhere that we can polish up between now and the match.’

The case was represented so urgently to the school that even Stalky and M‘Turk, who affected to despise football, played one Big-Side game seriously. They were forthwith promoted ere their ardour had time to cool, and the dignity of their Caps demanded that they should keep some show of virtue. The match-team was worked at least four days out of seven, and the school saw hope ahead.

With the last week of the term the Old Boys began to arrive, and their welcome was nicely proportioned to their worth. Gentlemen cadets from Sandhurst and Woolwich, who had only left a year ago, but who carried enormous side, were greeted with a cheerful ‘Hullo! What’s the Shop like?’ from those who had shared their studies. Militia subalterns had more consideration, but it was understood they were not precisely of the true metal. Recreants who, failing for the Army, had gone into business or banks were received for old sake’s sake, but in no way made too much of. But when the real subalterns, officers and gentlemen full-blown—who had been to the ends of the earth and back again and so carried no side—came on the scene strolling about with the Head, the school divided right and left in admiring silence. And when one laid hands on Flint, even upon the Head of the Games, crying, ‘Good Heavens! What do you mean by growing in this way? You were a beastly little fag when I left,’ visible halos encircled Flint. They would walk to and fro in the corridor with the little red school-sergeant, telling news of old regiments; they would burst into form-rooms sniffing the well-remembered smells of ink and whitewash; they would find nephews and cousins in the lower forms and present them with enormous wealth; or they would invade the gymnasium and make Foxy show off the new stock on the bars.

Chiefly, though, they talked with the Head, who was father-confessor and agent-general to them all; for what they shouted in their unthinking youth, they proved in their thoughtless manhood—to wit, that the Prooshian Bates was ’a downy bird.’ Young blood who had stumbled into an entanglement with a pastry-cook’s daughter at Plymouth; experience who had come into a small legacy but mistrusted lawyers; ambition halting at cross-roads, anxious to take the one that would lead him farthest; extravagance pursued by the money-lender; arrogance in the thick of a regimental row—each carried his trouble to the Head; and Chiron showed him, in language quite unfit for little boys, a quiet and safe way round, out, or under. So they overflowed his house, smoked his cigars, and drank his health as they had drunk it all the earth over when two or three of the old school had foregathered.

page 4

‘Don’t stop smoking for a minute,’ said the Head. ‘The more you’re out of training the better for us. I’ve demoralised the First Fifteen with extra-tu.’

‘Ah, but we’re a scratch lot. Have you told ’em we shall need a substitute even if Crandall can play?’ said a Lieutenant of Engineers with the D.S.O. to his credit.

‘He wrote me he’d play, so he can’t have been much hurt. He’s coming down to-morrow morning.’

‘Crandall minor that was, and brought off poor Duncan’s body?’ The Head nodded. ‘Where are you going to put him? We’ve turned you out of house and home already, Head Sahib.’ This was a Squadron-Commander of Bengal Lancers, home on leave.

‘I’m afraid he’ll have to go up to his old dormitory. You know old boys can claim that privilege. Yes, I think leetle Crandall minor must bed down there once more.’

‘Bates Sahib’—a Gunner flung a heavy arm round the Head’s neck—‘you’ve got something up your sleeve. Confess! I know that twinkle.’

‘Can’t you see, you cuckoo?’ a Submarine Miner interrupted. ‘Crandall goes up to the dormitory as an object-lesson, for moral effect and so forth. Isn’t that true, Head Sahib?’

‘It is. You know too much, Purvis. I licked you for that in ‘79.’

‘You did, sir, and it’s my private belief you chalked the cane.’

‘N-no. But I’ve a very straight eye. Perhaps that misled you.

That opened the flood-gates of fresh memories, and they all told tales out of school.

When Crandall minor that was—Lieutenant R. Crandall of an ordinary Indian regiment—arrived from Exeter on the morning of the match, he was cheered along the whole front of the College, for the prefects had repeated the sense of that which the Head had read them in Flint’s study. When Prout’s house understood that he would claim his Old Boy’s right to a bed for one night, Beetle ran into King’s house next door and executed a public ‘gloat’ up and down the enemy’s big form-room, departing in a haze of ink-pots.

‘What d’you take any notice of these rotters for?’ said Stalky, playing substitute for the Old Boys, magnificent in black jersey, white knickers, and black stockings. ‘I talked to him up in the dormitory when he was changin’. Pulled his sweater down for him. He’s cut about all over the arms—horrid purply ones. He’s goin’ to tell us about it to-night. I asked him to when I was lacin’ his boots.’

‘Well, you have got cheek,’ said Beetle enviously.

‘Slipped out before I thought. But he wasn’t a bit angry. He’s no end of a chap. I swear I’m goin’ to play up like beans. Tell Turkey!’

The technique of that match belongs to a bygone age. Scrimmages were tight and enduring; hacking was direct and to the purpose; and round the scrimmage stood the school, crying, ‘Put down your heads and shove!’ Toward the end everybody lost all sense of decency, and mothers of day-boys too close to the touch-line heard language not included in the bills. No one was actually carried off the field, but both sides felt happier when time was called, and Beetle helped Stalky and M‘Turk into their overcoats. The two had met in the many-legged heart of things, and as Stalky said, had ‘done each other proud.’ As they swaggered woodenly behind the teams—substitutes do not rank as equals of hairy men—they passed a pony-carriage near the wall, and a husky voice cried, ‘Well played. Oh, played indeed!’ It was Stettson major, white-cheeked and hollow-eyed, who had fought his way to the ground under escort of an impatient coachman.

‘Hullo, Stettson,’ said Stalky, checking. ‘Is it safe to come near you yet?’

‘Oh yes. I’m all right. They wouldn’t let me out before, but I had to come to the match. Your mouth looks pretty plummy.’

‘Turkey trod on it accidental-done-a-purpose. Well, I’m glad you’re better, because we owe you something. You and your membranes got us into a sweet mess, young man.’

‘I heard of that,’ said the boy, giggling. ‘The Head told me.’

‘Dooce he did! When?’

‘Oh, come on up to Coll. My shin ‘ll stiffen if we stay jawin’ here.’

‘Shut up, Turkey. I want to find out about this. Well?’

‘He was stayin’ at our house all the time I was ill.’

‘What for? Neglectin’ the Coll. that way? ’Thought he was in town.’

‘I was off my head, you know, and they said I kept on callin’ for him.’

‘Cheek! You’re only a day-boy.’

‘He came just the same, and he about saved my life. I was all bunged up one night—just goin’ to croak, the doctor said—and they stuck a tube or somethin’ in my throat, and the Head sucked out the stuff.’

‘Ugh! ‘Shot if I would!’

‘He ought to have got diphtheria himself, the doctor said. So he stayed on at our house instead of going back. I’d ha’ croaked in another twenty minutes, the doctor says.’

Here the coachman, being under orders, whipped up and nearly ran over the three.

‘My Hat!’ said Beetle. ‘That’s pretty average heroic.’

‘Pretty average!’ M‘Turk’s knee in the small of his back cannoned him into Stalky, who punted him back. ‘You ought to be hung!’

‘And the Head ought to get the V.C.,’ said Stalky. ‘Why, he might have been dead and buried by now. But he wasn’t. But he didn’t. Ho! ho! He just nipped through the hedge like a lusty old blackbird. Extra-special, five hundred lines, an’ gated for a week—all sereno!’

page 5

‘I’ve read o’ somethin’ like that in a book,’ said Beetle. ‘Gummy, what a chap! Just think of it!’

‘I’m thinking,’ said M‘Turk; and he delivered a wild Irish yell that made the team turn round.

‘Shut your fat mouth,’ said Stalky, dancing with impatience. ‘Leave it to your Uncle Stalky, and he’ll have the Head on toast. If you say a word, Beetle, till I give you leave, I swear I’ll slay you. Habeo Capitem crinibus minimis. I’ve got him by the short hairs! Now look as if nothing had happened.’

There was no need of guile. The school was too busy cheering the drawn match. It hung round the lavatories regardless of muddy boots while the team washed. It cheered Crandall minor whenever it caught sight of him, and it cheered more wildly than ever after prayers, because the Old Boys in evening dress, openly twirling their moustaches, attended, and instead of standing with the masters, ranged themselves along the wall immediately before the prefects; and the Head called them over, too—majors, minors, and tertiuses, after their old names.

‘Yes, it’s all very fine,’ he said to his guests after dinner, ‘but the boys are getting a little out of hand. There will be trouble and sorrow later, I’m afraid. You’d better turn in early, Crandall. The dormitory will be sitting up for you. I don’t know to what dizzy heights you may climb in your profession, but I do know you’ll never get such absolute adoration as you’re getting now.’

‘Confound the adoration. I want to finish my cigar, sir.’

‘It’s all pure gold. Go where glory waits, Crandall—minor.’

The setting of that apotheosis was a ten-bed attic dormitory, communicating through doorless openings with three others. The gas flickered over the raw pine wash-stands. There was an incessant whistling of draughts, and outside the naked windows the sea beat on the Pebbleridge.

‘Same old bed—same old mattress, I believe,’ said Crandall, yawning. ‘Same old everything. Oh, but I’m lame! I’d no notion you chaps could play like this.’ He caressed a battered shin. ‘You’ve given us all something to remember you by.’

It needed a few minutes to put them at their ease; and, in some way they could not understand, they were more easy when Crandall turned round and said his prayers—a ceremony he had neglected for some years.

‘Oh, I am sorry. I’ve forgotten to put out the gas.’

‘Please don’t bother,’ said the prefect of the dormitory. ‘Worthington does that.’

A nightgowned twelve-year-old, who had been waiting to show off, leaped from his bed to the bracket and back again, by way of a washstand.

‘How d’you manage when he’s asleep?’ said Crandall, chuckling.

‘Shove a cold cleek down his neck.’

‘It was a wet sponge when I was junior in the dormitory. . . . Hullo! What’s happening?’

The darkness had filled with whispers, the sound of trailing rugs, bare feet on bare boards, protests, giggles, and threats such as:

‘Be quiet, you ass! . . . Squattez-vous on the floor, then! . . . I swear you aren’t going to sit on my bed! . . . Mind the tooth-glass,’ etc.

‘Sta—Corkran said,’ the prefect began, his tone showing his sense of Stalky’s insolence, ‘that perhaps you’d tell us about that business with Duncan’s body.’

‘Yes—yes—yes,’ ran the keen whispers. ‘Tell us.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. What on earth are you chaps hoppin’ about in the cold for?’

‘Never mind us,’ said the voices. ‘Tell about Fat-Sow.’

So Crandall turned on his pillow and spoke to the generation he could not see.

‘Well, about three months ago he was commanding a treasure-guard—a cart full of rupees to pay troops with—five thousand rupees in silver. He was comin’ to a place called Fort Pearson, near Kalabagh.’

‘I was born there,’ squeaked a small fag. ‘It was called after my uncle.’

‘Shut up—you and your uncle! Never mind him, Crandall.’

‘Well, ne’er mind. The Afridis found out that this treasure was on the move, and they ambushed the whole show a couple of miles before he got to the fort, and cut up the escort. Duncan was wounded, and the escort hooked it. There weren’t more than twenty Sepoys all told, and there were any amount of Afridis. As things turned out, I was in charge at Fort Pearson. Fact was, I’d heard the firing and was just going to see about it, when Duncan’s men came up. So we all turned back together. They told me something about an officer, but I couldn’t get the hang of things till I saw a chap under the wheels of the cart out in the open, propped up on one arm, blazing away with a revolver. You see, the escort had abandoned the cart, and the Afridis—they’re an awfully suspicious gang—thought the retreat was a trap—sort of draw, you know—and the cart was the bait. So they had left poor old Duncan alone. ’Minute they spotted how few we were, it was a race across the flat who should reach old Duncan first. We ran, and they ran, and we won, and after a little hackin’ about they pulled off. I never knew it was one of us till I was right on top of him. There are heaps of Duncans in the service, and of course the name didn’t remind me. He wasn’t changed at all hardly. He’d been shot through the lungs, poor old man, and he was pretty thirsty. I gave him a drink and sat down beside him, and—funny thing, too—he said, “Hullo, Toffee!” and I said, “Hullo, Fat-Sow! hope you aren’t hurt,” or something of the kind. But he died in a minute or two—never lifted his head off my knees. . . . I say, you chaps out there will get your death of cold. Better go to bed.’

‘All right. In a minute. But your cuts—your cuts. How did you get wounded?’

‘That was when we were taking the body back to the Fort. They came on again, and there was a bit of a scrimmage.’

‘Did you kill any one?’

‘Yes. Shouldn’t wonder. Good-night.’

page 6

‘Good-night. Thank you, Crandall. Thanks awf’ly, Crandall. Good-night.’

The unseen crowds withdrew. His own dormitory rustled into bed and lay silent for a while.

‘I say, Crandall’—Stalky’s voice was tuned to a wholly foreign reverence.

‘Well, what?’

‘Suppose a chap found another chap croaking with diphtheria—all bunged up with it—and they stuck a tube in his throat and the chap sucked the stuff out, what would you say?’

‘Um,’ said Crandall reflectively. ‘I’ve only heard of one case, and that was a doctor. He did it for a woman.’

‘Oh, this wasn’t a woman. It was only a boy.’

‘Makes it all the finer, then. It’s about the bravest thing a man can do. Why?’

‘Oh, I heard of a chap doin’ it. That’s all.’

‘Then he’s a brave man.’

‘Would you funk it?’

‘Ra-ather. Anybody would. Fancy dying of diphtheria in cold blood.’

‘Well—ah! Er! Look here!’ The sentence ended in a grunt, for Stalky had leaped out of bed and with M‘Turk was sitting on the head of Beetle, who would have sprung the mine there and then.

Next day, which was the last of the term and given up to a few wholly unimportant examinations, began with wrath and war. Mr. King had discovered that nearly all his house—it lay, as you know, next door but one to Prout’s in the long range of buildings—had unlocked the doors between the dormitories and had gone in to listen to a story told by Crandall. He went to the Head, clamorous, injured, appealing; for he never approved of allowing so-called young men of the world to contaminate the morals of boyhood. ‘Very good,’ said the Head. He would attend to it.

‘Well, I’m awf’ly sorry,’ said Crandall guiltily. ‘I don’t think I told ’em anything they oughtn’t to hear. Don’t let them get into trouble on my account.’

‘Tck!’ the Head answered, with the ghost of a wink. ‘It isn’t the boys that make trouble; it’s the masters. However, Prout and King don’t approve of dormitory gatherings on this scale, and one must back up the house-masters. Moreover, it’s hopeless to punish two houses only, so late in the term. We must be fair and include everybody. Let’s see. They have a holiday task for the Easters, which, of course, none of them will ever look at. We will give the whole school, except prefects and study-boys, regular prep. to-night; and the Common-room will have to supply a master to take it. We must be fair to all.’

‘Prep. on the last night of the term. Whew!’ said Crandall, thinking of his own wild youth. ‘I fancy there will be larks.’

The school, frolicking among packed trunks, whooping down the corridor, and ‘gloating’ in form-rooms, received the news with amazement and rage. No school in the world did prep. on the last night of the term. This thing was monstrous, tyrannical, subversive of law, religion, and morality. They would go into the form-rooms, and they would take their degraded holiday task with them, but—here they smiled and speculated what manner of man the Common-room would send up against them. The lot fell on Mason, credulous and enthusiastic, who loved youth. No other master was anxious to take that ‘prep.,’ for the school lacked the steadying influence of tradition; and men accustomed to the ordered routine of ancient foundations found it occasionally insubordinate. The four long form-rooms, in which all below the rank of study-boys worked, received him with thunders of applause. Ere he had coughed twice they favoured him with a metrical summary of the marriage-laws of Great Britain, as recorded by the High Priest of the Israelites and commented on by the leader of the host. The lower forms reminded him that it was the last day, and that therefore he must ‘take it all in play.’ When he dashed off to rebuke them, the Lower Fourth and Upper Third began with one accord to be sick, loudly and realistically. Mr. Mason tried, of all vain things under heaven, to argue with them, and a bold soul at a back desk bade him ‘take fifty lines for not ’olding up ’is ’and before speaking.’ As one who prided himself upon the precision of his English this cut Mason to the quick, and while he was trying to discover the offender, the Upper and Lower Second, three form-rooms away, turned out the gas and threw ink-pots. It was a pleasant and stimulating ‘prep.’ The study-boys and prefects heard the echoes of it far off, and the Common-room at dessert smiled.

Stalky waited, watch in hand, till half-past eight.

‘If it goes on much longer the Head will come up,’ said he. ‘We’ll tell the studies first, and then the form-rooms. Look sharp!’

He allowed no time for Beetle to be dramatic or M‘Turk to drawl. They poured into study after study, told their tale, and went again so soon as they saw they were understood, waiting for no comment; while the noise of that unholy ‘prep.’ grew and deepened. By the door of Flint’s study they met Mason flying towards the corridor.

‘He’s gone to fetch the Head. Hurry up! Come on!’

They broke into Number Twelve form-room abreast and panting.

‘The Head! The Head! The Head!’ That call stilled the tumult for a minute, and Stalky leaping to a desk shouted, ‘He went and sucked the diphtheria stuff out of Stettson major’s throat when we thought he was in town. Stop rotting, you asses! Stettson major would have croaked if the Head hadn’t done it. The Head might have died himself. Crandall says it’s the bravest thing any livin’ man can do, and’—his voice cracked—‘the Head don’t know we know!’

M‘Turk and Beetle, jumping from desk to desk, drove the news home among the junior forms. There was a pause, and then, Mason behind him, the Head entered. It was in the established order of things that no boy should speak or move under his eye. He expected the hush of awe. He was received with cheers—steady, ceaseless cheering. Being a wise man he went away, and the forms were silent and a little frightened.

‘It’s all right,’ said Stalky. ‘He can’t do much. ’Tisn’t as if you’d pulled the desks up like we did when old Carleton took prep. once. Keep it up! Hear ’em cheering in the studies!’ He rocketed out with a yell, to find Flint and the prefects lifting the roof off the corridor.

page 7

When the Head of a limited liability company, paying four per cent., is cheered on his saintly way to prayers, not only by four form-rooms of boys waiting punishment, but by his trusted prefects, he can either ask for an explanation or go his road with dignity, while the senior housemaster glares like an excited cat and points out to a white and trembling mathematical master that certain methods—not his, thank God—usually produce certain results. Out of delicacy the Old Boys did not attend that call-over; and it was to the school drawn up in the gymnasium that the Head spoke icily.

‘It is not often that I do not understand you; but I confess I do not to-night. Some of you, after your idiotic performances at prep., seem to think me a fit person to cheer. I am going to show you that I am not.’

Crash—crash—crash—came the triple cheer that disproved it, and the Head glowered under the gas.

‘That is enough. You will gain nothing. The little boys (the Lower School did not like that form of address) will do me three hundred lines apiece in the holidays. I shall take no further notice of them. The Upper School will do me one thousand lines apiece in the holidays, to be shown up the evening of the day they come back. And further——’

‘Gummy, what a glutton!’ Stalky whispered.

‘For your behaviour towards Mr. Mason I intend to lick the whole of the Upper School to-morrow when I give you your journey-money. This will include the three study-boys I found dancing on the form-room desks when I came up. Prefects will stay after call-over.’

The school filed out in silence, but gathered in groups by the gymnasium door waiting what might befall.

‘And now, Flint,’ said the Head, ‘will you be good enough to give me some explanation of your conduct?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Flint desperately, ’if you save a chap’s life at the risk of your own when he’s dyin’ of diphtheria, and the Coll. finds it out, whawhat can you expect, sir?’

‘Um, I see. Then that noise was not meant for—ah, cheek. I can connive at immorality, but I cannot stand impudence. However, it does not excuse their insolence to Mr. Mason. I’ll forgo the lines this once, remember; but the lickings hold good.’

When this news was made public, the school, lost in wonder and admiration, gasped at the Head as he went to his house. Here was a man to be reverenced. On the rare occasions when he caned he did it very scientifically, and the execution of a hundred boys would be epic—immense.

‘It’s all right, Head Sahib. We know,’ said Crandall, as the Head slipped off his gown with a grunt in his smoking-room. ‘I found out just now from our substitute. He was gettin’ my opinion of your performance last night in the dormitory. I didn’t know then that it was you he was talkin’ about. Crafty young animal. Freckled chap with eyes—Corkran, I think his name is.’

‘Oh, I know him, thank you,’ said the Head; and reflectively, ‘Ye-es, I should have included them even if I hadn’t seen ’em.’

‘If the old Coll. weren’t a little above themselves already, we’d chair you down the corridor,’ said the Engineer. ‘Oh, Bates, how could you? You might have caught it yourself, and where would we have been then?’

‘I always knew you were worth twenty of us any day. Now I’m sure of it,’ said the Squadron Commander, looking round for contradictions.

‘He isn’t fit to manage a school, though. Promise you’ll never do it again, Bates Sahib. We—we can’t go away comfy in our minds if you take these risks,’ said the Gunner.

‘Bates Sahib, you aren’t ever goin’ to cane the whole Upper School, are you?’ said Crandall.

‘I can connive at immorality, as I said, but I can’t stand impudence. Mason’s lot is quite hard enough even when I back him. Besides, the men at the golf-club heard them singing “Aaron and Moses.” I shall have complaints about that from the parents of day-boys. Decency must be preserved.’

‘We’re coming to help,’ said all the guests.

The Upper School were caned one after the other, their overcoats over their arms, the brakes waiting in the road below to take them to the station, their journey-money on the table. The Head began with Stalky, M‘Turk, and Beetle. He dealt faithfully by them.

‘And here’s your journey-money. Good-bye, and pleasant holidays.’

‘Good-bye. Thank you, sir. Good-bye.’

They shook hands.

‘Desire don’t outrun performance—much—this mornin’. We got the cream of it,’ said Stalky. ‘Now wait till a few chaps come out, and we’ll really cheer him.’

‘Don’t wait on our account, please,’ said Crandall, speaking for the Old Boys. ‘We’re going to begin now.’

It was very well so long as the cheering was confined to the corridor, but when it spread to the gymnasium, when the boys awaiting their turn cheered, the Head gave it up in despair, and the remnant flung themselves upon him to shake hands.

Then they seriously devoted themselves to cheering till the brakes were hustled off the premises in dumb show.

‘Didn’t I say I’d get even with him?’ said Stalky on the box-seat, as they swung into the narrow Northam street. ‘Now all together—takin’ time from your Uncle Stalky:

It’s a way we have in the Army,
It’s a way we have in the Navy,
It’s a way we have in the Public Schools,
        Which nobody can deny!’

Shall I not one day remember thy Bower—
One day when all days are one day to me?
Thinking I stirred not and yet had the power,
Yearning—ah, God, if again it might be!
—The Song of the Bower.

 
THIS is a base betrayal of confidence, but the sin is Mrs. Hauksbee’s and not mine.
If you remember a certain foolish tale called “The Education of Otis Yeere,” you will not forget that Mrs. Mallowe laughed at the wrong time, which was a single, and at Mrs. Hauksbee, which was a double, offence. An experiment had gone wrong, and it seems that Mrs. Mallowe had said some quaint things about the experimentrix.

“I am not angry,” said Mrs. Hauksbee, “and I admire Polly in spite of her evil counsels to me. But I shall wait—I shall wait, like the frog footman in Alice in Wonderland, and Providence will deliver Polly into my hands. It always does if you wait.” And she departed to vex the soul of the “Hawley boy,” who says that she is singularly “uninstruite and childlike.” He got that first word out of a Ouida novel. I do not know what it means, but am prepared to make an affidavit before the Collector that it does not mean Mrs. Hauksbee.

Mrs. Hauksbee’s ideas of waiting are very liberal. She told the “Hawley boy” that he dared not tell Mrs. Reiver that “she was an intellectual woman with a gift for attracting men,” and she offered another man two waltzes if he would repeat the same thing in the same ears. But he said: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” which means “Mistrust all waltzes except those you get for legitimate asking.”

The “Hawley boy” did as he was told because he believes in Mrs. Hauksbee. He was the instrument in the hand of a Higher Power, and he wore jharun coats, like “the scoriac rivers that roll their sulphurous torrents down Yahek, in the realms of the Boreal Pole,” that made your temples throb when seen early in the morning. I will introduce him to you some day if all goes well. He is worth knowing.

Unpleasant things have already been written about Mrs. Reiver in other places.

She was a person without invention. She used to get her ideas from the men she captured, and this led to some eccentric changes of character. For a month or two she would act à la Madonna, and try Theo for a change if she fancied Theo’s ways suited her beauty. Then she would attempt the dark and fiery Lilith, and so and so on, exactly as she had absorbed the new notion. But there was always Mrs. Reiver—hard, selfish, stupid Mrs. Reiver—at the back of each transformation. Mrs. Hauksbee christened her the Magic Lantern on account of this borrowed mutability. “It just depends upon the slide,” said Mrs. Hauksbee. “The case is the only permanent thing in the exhibition. But that, thank Heaven, is getting old,”

There was a Fancy Ball at Government House and Mrs. Reiver came attired in some sort of ’98 costume, with her hair pulled up to the top of her head, showing the clear outline on the back of the neck like the Récamier engravings. Mrs. Hauksbee had chosen to be loud, not to say vulgar, that evening, and went as The Black Death—a curious arrangement of barred velvet, black domino and flame-coloured satin puffery coming up to the neck and the wrists, with one of those shrieking keel-backed cicalas in the hair. The scream of the creature made people jump. It sounded so unearthly in a ballroom.

I heard her say to some one: “Let me introduce you to Madame Récamier,” and I saw a man dressed as Autolycus bowing to Mrs. Reiver, while The Black Death looked more than usually saintly. It was a very pleasant evening, and Autolycus and Madame Recamier—I heard her ask Autolycus who Madame Récamier was, by the way—danced together ever so much. Mrs. Hauksbee was in a meditative mood, but she laughed once or twice in the back of her throat, and that meant trouble.

Autolycus was Trewinnard, the man whom Mrs. Mallowe had told Mrs. Hauksbee about—the Platonic Paragon, as Mrs. Hauksbee called him. He was amiable, but his moustache hid his mouth, and so he did not explain himself all at once. If you stared at him, he turned his eyes away, and through the rest of the dinner kept looking at you to see whether you were looking again. He took stares as a tribute to his merits, which were generally known and recognised. When he played billiards he apologised at length between each bad stroke, and explained what would have happened if the red had been somewhere else, or the bearer had trimmed the third lamp, or the wind hadn’t made the door bang. Also he wriggled in his chair more than was becoming to one of his inches. Little men may wriggle and fidget without attracting notice. It doesn’t suit big-framed men. He was the Main Girder Boom of the Kutcha, Pukka, Bimdobust and Benaoti Department and corresponded direct with the Three Taped Bashaw. Every one knows what that means. The men in his own office said that where anything was to be gained, even temporarily, he would never hesitate for a moment over handing up a subordinate to be hanged and drawn and quartered. He didn’t back up his underlings, and for that reason they dreaded taking responsibility on their shoulders, and the strength of the Department was crippled.

A weak Department can, and often does, do a power of good work simply because its chief sees it through thick and thin. Mistakes may be bom of this policy, but it is safe and sounder than giving orders which may be read in two ways and reserving to yourself the right of interpretation according to subsequent failure or success. Offices prefer administration to diplomacy. They are very like Empires.

Hatchett of the Almirah and Thannicutch—a vicious little three-cornered Department that was always stamping on the toes of the Elect—had the fairest estimate of Trewinnard, when he said: “I don’t believe he is as good as he is.” They always quoted that verdict as an instance of the blind jealousy of the Uncovenanted, but Hatchett was quite right. Trewinnard was just as good and no better than Mrs. Mallowe could make him; and she had been engaged on the work for three years. Hatchett has a narrow-minded partiality for the more than naked—the anatomised Truth—but he can gauge a man.

Trewinnard had been spoilt by over-much petting, and the devil of vanity that rides nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand made him behave as he did. He had been too long one woman’s property; and that belief will sometimes drive a man to throw the best things in the world behind him, from rank perversity. Perhaps che only meant to stray temporarily and then return, but in arranging for this excursion he misimderstood both Mrs. Mallowe and Mrs. Reiver. The one made no sign, she would have died first; and the other—well, the high-falutin mindsome lay was her craze for the time being. She had never tried it before and several men had hinted that it would eminently become her. Trewinnard was in himself pleasant, with the great merit of belonging to somebody else. He was what they call “intellectual,” and vain to the marrow. Mrs. Reiver returned his lead in the first, and hopelessly out-trumped him in the second suit. Put down all that comes after this to Providence or The Black Death.

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Trewimiard never realised how far he had fallen from his allegiance till Mrs. Reiver referred to some official matter that he had been telling her about as “ours.” He remembered then how that word had been sacred to Mrs. Mallowe and how she had asked his permission to use it. Opium is intoxicating, and so is whisky, but more intoxicating than either to a certain build of mind is the first occasion on which a woman—especially if she have asked leave for the “honour”—identifies herself with a man’s work. The second time is not so pleasant. The answer has been given before, and the treachery comes to the top and tastes coppery in the mouth.

Trewinnard swallowed the shame—he felt dimly that he was not doing Mrs. Reiver any great wrong by untruth—and told and told and continued to tell, for the snare of this form of open-heartedness is that no man, unless he be a consmnmate liar, knows where to stop. The office door of all others must be either open wide or shut tight with a shaprassi to keep off callers.

Mrs. Mallowe made no sign to show that she felt Trewinnard’s desertion till a piece of information that could only have come from one quarter ran about Simla like quicksilver. She met Trewinnard at a dinner. “Choose your confidantes better, Harold,” she whispered as she passed him in the drawing-room. He turned salmon-colour, and swore very hard to himself that Babu Durga Charan Laha must go—must go—must go. He almost believed in that grey-headed old oyster’s guilt.

And so another of those upside-down tragedies that we call a Simla Season wore through to the end—from the Birthday Ball to the “tripping” to Naldera and Kotghar. And fools gave feasts and wise men ate them, and they were bidden to the wedding and sat down to bake, and those who had nuts had no teeth and they staked the substance for the shadow, and carried coals to Newcastle, and in the dark all cats were grey, as it was in the days of the great Curé of Meudon.

Late in the year there developed itself a battle-royal between the K.P.B. and B. Department and the Almirah and Thannicutch. Three columns of this paper would be needed to supply you with the outlines of the difficulty; and then you would not be grateful. Hatchett snuffed the fray from afar and went into it with his teeth bared to the gums, while his Department stood behind him solid to a man. They believed in him, and their answer to the fury of men who detested him was: “Ah! But you’ll admit he’s d—d right in what he says.”

“The head of Trewinnard in a Government Resolution,” said Hatchett, and he told the daftri to put a new pad on his blotter, and smiled a bleak smile as he spread out his notes. Hatchett is a Thug in his systematic way of butchering a man’s reputation.

“What are you going to do?” asked Trewinnard’s Department. “Sit tight,” said Trewinnard, which was tantamount to saying “Lord knows.” The Department groaned and said: “Which of us poor beggars is to be Jonahed this time?” They knew Trewinnard’s vice.

The dispute was essentially not one for the K.P.B. and B. under its then direction to fight out. It should have been compromised, or at the worst sent up to the Supreme Government with a private and confidential note directing justice into the proper paths.

Some people say that the Supreme Government is the Devil. It is more like the Deep Sea. Anything that you throw into it disappears for weeks, and comes to light hacked and furred at the edges, crusted with weeds and shells and almost unrecognisable. The bold man who would dare to give it a file of love-letters would be amply rewarded. It would overlay them with original comments and marginal notes, and work them piecemeal into D. O. dockets. Few things, from a setter or a whirlpool to a sausage-machine or a hatching hen, are more interesting and peculiar than the Supreme Government.

“What shall we do?” said Trewinnard, who had fallen from grace into sin. “Fight,” said Mrs. Reiver, or words to that effect; and no one can say how far aimless desire to test her powers, and how far belief in the man she had brought to her feet prompted the judgment. Of the merits of the case she knew just as much as any ayah.

Then Mrs. Mallowe, upon an evil word that went through Simla, put on her visiting-garb and attired herself for the sacrifice, and went to call—to call upon Mrs. Reiver, knowing what the torture would be. From half-past twelve till twenty-five minutes to two she sat, her hand upon her cardcase, and let Mrs. Reiver stab at her, all for the sake of the information. Mrs. Reiver double-acted her part, but she played into Mrs. Mallowe’s hand by this defect. The assumptions of ownership, the little intentional slips, were overdone, and so also was the pretence of intimate knowledge. Mrs. Mallowe never winced. She repeated to herself: “And he has trusted this—this Thing. She knows nothing and she cares nothing, and she has digged this trap for him.” The main feature of the case was abundantly clear. Trewinnard, whose capacities Mrs. Mallowe knew to the utmost farthing, to whom public and departmental petting were as the breath of his delicately-cut nostrils—Trewinnard, with his nervous dread of dispraise, was to be pitted against the Paul de Cassagnac of the Almirah and Thannicutch—the unspeakable Hatchett, who fought with the venom of a woman and the skill of a Red Indian. Unless his cause was triply just, Trewinnard was already under the guiotine. and if he had been under this “Thing’s” dominance, small hope for the justice of his case. “Oh, why did I let him go without putting out a hand to fetch him back?” said Mrs. Mallowe, as she got into her ’rickshaw.

Now, Tim, her fox-terrier, is the only person who knows what Mrs. Mallowe did that afternoon, and as I found him loafing on the Mall in a very disconsolate condition and as he recognised me effusively and suggested going for a monkey-hunt—a thing he had never done before—my impression is that Mrs. Mallowe stayed at home till the light fell and thought. If she did this, it is of course hopeless to account for her actions. So you must fill in the gap for yourself.

That evening it rained heavily, and horses mired their riders. But not one of all the habits was so plastered with mud as the habit of Mrs. Mallowe when she pulled up under the scrub oaks and sent in her name by the astounded bearer to Trewinnard. “Folly! downright folly!” she said as she sat in the steam of the dripping horse. “But it’s all a horrible jumble together.”

It may be as well to mention that ladies do not usually call upon bachelors at their houses. Bachelors would scream and run away. Trewinnard came into the light of the verandah with a nervous, undecided smile upon his lips, and he wished—in the bottomless bottom of his bad heart—he wished that Mrs. Reiver was there to see. A minute later he was profoundly glad that he was alone, for Mrs. Mallowe was standing in his office room and calling him names that reflected no credit on his intellect. “What have you done? What have you said?’ she asked. “Be quick! Be quick! And have the horse led round to the back. Can you speak? What have you written? Show me!”

She had interrupted him in the middle of what he was pleased to call his reply; for Hatchett’s first shell had already fallen in the camp. He stood back and offered her the seat at the duftar table. Her elbow left a great wet stain on the baize, for she was soaked through and through.

“Say exactly how the matter stands,” she said, and laughed a weak little laugh, which emboldened Trewinnard to say loftily: “Pardon me, Mrs. Mallowe, but I hardly recognise your——’

“Idiot! Will you show me the papers, will you speak, and will you be quick?”

page 3

Her most reverent admirers would hardly have recognised the soft-spoken, slow-gestured, quiet-eyed Mrs. Mallowe in the indignant woman who was drununing on Trewinnard’s desk. He submitted to the voice of authority, as he had submitted in the old times, and explained as quickly as might be the cause of the war between the two Departments. In conclusion he handed over the rough sheets of his reply. As she read he watched her with the expectant sickly half-smile of the unaccustomed writer who is doubtful of the success of his work. And another smile followed, but died away as he saw Mrs. Mallowe read his production. All the old phrases out of which she had so carefully drilled him had returned; the unpruned fluency of diction was there, the more luxuriant for being so long cut back; the reckless riotousness of assertion that sacrificed all—even the vital truth that Hatchett would be so sure to take advantage of—for the sake of scoring a point, was there; and through and between every line ran the weak, wilful vanity of the man. Mrs. Mallowe’s mouth hardened.

“And you wrote this!” she said. Then to herself: “He wrote this!”

Trewinnard stepped forward with a gesture habitual to him when he wished to explain. Mrs. Reiver had never asked for explanations. She had told him that all his ways were perfect. Therefore he loved her.

Mrs. Mallowe tore up the papers one by one, saying as she did so: “You were going to cross swords with Hatchett. Do you know your own strength? Oh, Harold, Harold, it is too pitiable! I thought—I thought——” Then the great anger that had been growing in her broke out, and she cried: “Oh, you fool! You blind, blind, blind, trumpery fool! Why do I help you? Why do I have anything to do with you? You miserable man! Sit down and write as I dictate. Quickly! And I had chosen you out of a hundred other men! Write! It is a terrible thing to be found out by a mere unseeing male—Thackeray has said it. It is worse, far worse, to be found out by a woman, and in that hour after long years to discover her worth. For ten minutes Trewinnard’s pen scratched across the paper, and Mrs. Mallowe spoke. “And that is all,” she said bitterly. “As you value yourself—your noble, honourable, modest self—keep within that.”

But that was not all—by any means. At least as far as Trewinnard was concerned.

He rose from his chair and delivered his soul of many mad and futile thoughts—such things as a man babbles when he is deserted of the gods, has missed his hold upon the latch-door of Opportunity—and cannot see that the ways are shut. Mrs. Mallowe bore with him to the end, and he stood before her—no enviable creature to look upon.

“A cur as well as a fool!” she said. “Will you be good enough to tell them to bring my horse? I do not trust to your honour—you have none—but I believe that your sense of shame will keep you from speaking of my visit.”

So he was left in the verandah crying “Come back” like a distracted guinea-fowl.

.     .     .     .     .

“He’s done us in the eye,” grunted Hatchett as he perused the K.P.B. and B. reply. “Look at the cunning of the brute in shifting the issue on to India in that carneying, blarneying way! Only wait until I can get my knife into him again. I’ll stop every bolt-hole before the hunt begins.”

.     .     .     .     .

Oh, I believe I have forgotten to mention the success of Mrs. Hauksbee’s revenge. It was so brilliant and overwhelming that she had to cry in Mrs. Mallowe’s arms for the better part of half an hour; and Mrs. Mallowe was just as bad, though she thanked Mrs. Hauksbee several times in the course of the interview, and Mrs. Hauksbee said that she would repent and reform, and Mrs. Mallowe said: “Hush, dear, hushl I don’t think either of us had anything to be proud of.” And Mrs. Hauksbee said: “Oh, but I didn’t mean it, Polly, I didn’t mean itl” And I stood with my hat in my hand trying to make two very indignant ladies imderstand that the bearer really had given me “salaam bolta.”

That was an evil quarter minute.

WE WERE BORN, with many others, in the Black Week of ’99; and the story of our adventures would fill a book. It is enough for the world to know that the Marquis, the Squire, and the Farmer gave us leave to lay out a thousand-yard range over their broad Downs; that the Range was made and passed to National Rifle Association specification; that we number, perhaps, sixty working members, and hope to become fair shots. You may see us, any weekend, strolling down by ones and twos to the little loft where the Lee-Enfields live, under the eye of the Sergeant-Instructor. Six months ago we should have handled a rifle as a bachelor handles a baby, but now we know the vices and virtues of all our twelve. Gorman, of the Electric Light Works, picks out Number Nine (a free-thinking old lady, near-sighted, and hard-mouthed) with a disparaging grunt. Number Seven of the light pull is his favourite, but Andrews the carpenter has just taken her. ‘Never mind,’ says Hawkins the gardener, lengthening the sling of Number Two, ‘you can change on the ground with Andrews.’ ‘M’ yes,’ says Gorman, ‘after Andrews has gone and got her fouled. She throws up like a pump when she’s fouled — Seven does.’

Last autumn, we would marvellously tie ourselves up in our slings; but skirmishing-drill once, and range-work twice at least a week, has wonted us to the heft and balance of the long rifles. The accepted fashion is to sling our gun across our back, shove both hands into our pockets, and progress at ease. The range is not fifteen minutes’ walk from the village. Hawkins hurries on ahead. He has carnations to pot this afternoon, but is taking advantage of a spare minute to get off half his allowance (each man has ten rounds free a week) at two hundred. Our time, of course, is not all our own; but the Sergeant knows our business engagements pretty closely and takes urgent cases first. ‘Jimmy the Crack’ (he that won the prize rifle at the spring competition) passes us with the cheerful news that the new regulation Bisley target is in use — a seven-inch bull at two hundred. We do not need to be told that there is also a roaring north-easter on the Downs. It catches us as a razor catches a rough face; purring and scraping over the thyme-studded turf the moment we leave the village street. A mile away, very clear in the sun-glare, the lathy youngsters of the local training-stable are dancing in their body-cloths as they file towards Windy Height Barn. The trainer’s son, on a hot three-year-old who gallops alone, comes sidling and frisking behind us. He is a very good shot in process of being made. The three-year-old (also being made) bucks at the sight of the rifles, which he has not seen more than twenty times and makes pretence of flight. The boy catches him neatly on the first bound and laughs. ‘Comin’ down this evenin’?’ somebody calls out. He nods. ‘Bad for your hand, if he pulls much, isn’t it?’ ‘Ye-es, but he won’t pull.’ He turns his youngster on to the dry turf and gets off at a stretching canter. ‘Don’t wonder we don’t hit ’em when they’re ridin’ away—the Boers-much,’ says a bad shot meditatively, as horse and rider grow small across the green. We discuss this point as we breast the slope above the Squire’s kennels, and just below East Hill. Some one delivers himself of the final argument. ‘Young Carroll, he told us that at long range it don’t matter about hittin’ ’em so much. The thing is, he said, to pick up the range of the next ridge quick enough, and to keep on sprayin’ it down near enough an’ long enough to make ’em lie quiet.’

‘Young Carroll’ was a farmer’s son who served a year in the South African Light Horse, returned to his native village, en route for the Argentine, and out of his extended experience—for he had over a dozen big affairs to his credit—gave us valuable tips. Our Downs are precisely like the veldt, in that so soon as you have crowned one ridge you are deadlily commanded by the next. For instance, here we are on the top of East Hill, and all the range is spread below us. A thousand yards to the east, at the bottom of the three-hundred-foot hummock that Nature has so kindly built for a stop-butt, the windmill-targets flicker and wheel against their dun sod-backing; a line of gorse in bloom marks the Two-hundred range; a black tarred shed where we keep our oddments the Five-hundred firing-point. Behind that, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine rise one above the other step-fashion from the smooth turf. They command every inch of the ground, and except at the Two-hundred all shooting is a little downhill. It looks big enough in all conscience, this treeless, roadless, fenceless cup of green on the edge of the English Channel. And yet from the hill behind the butts, where the red flag streams to where we stand, cannot be more than fifteen hundred yards; and that would mean most open order if bullets were coming the other way. Young Carroll and two or three other warriors have taught us to consider these things. Already we have learned to look at the scattered furze-patches among the sheep-walks with an eye to more than rabbits, and to think over the value of little dimples and wrinkles in what to a stranger would show for level ground.

At the Two-hundred we find our much-advertised Bisley bull, not more conspicuous than the head of a bonnet-pin. Hawkins and Yeo the chemist are hammering at it. The tricky wind, focused in the bottom of the valley, playfully pats and twitches their rifles, as a kitten pats a cork. We, waiting to get our hand steady after the run down, chuckle while shot after shot drives right and right again. ‘You won’t laugh in a minute/ says the Sergeant grimly. ‘Try your last three from the shoulder, Mr. Yeo.’ That is Yeo’s strong point. He jumps up relievedly and pumps in a bull and two magpies. Hawkins, after five shots, returns to his carnations. The business of gardening teaches one to wait on the weather. Hawkins, will further ‘pot’ that bull to-morrow when it may not be so gusty. Gorman and Number Nine get down alongside of young Nutley, that was a gardener’s boy, but is now becoming a man and a shot. ‘This wind’ll about suit her,’ says Andrews with a wink, as Gorman’s cheek cuddles the stock. ‘Hold!’ cries the Sergeant, and there is a roar of laughter. We are rather a doggy community. Billy, Babette, and Tim are lying down beside their owners, but the markers have taken Flossie into the trench, and that impudent little beast has escaped and is sitting precisely under the bull’s-eye. The breech-bolts clack as Gorman and Nutley rise to their knees; our red flag goes up and the Sergeant’s whistle cuts across the wind. Out crawls a marker, but Flossie has disappeared behind the sod-banks. The marker cannot see what we would be at, for our voices are carried away by the gale, and so re-signals the last shot. ‘Oh, get up and tell him, Ted,’ says Gorman. Young Nutley uncoils himself and flings his long arms abroad. He is the star of our signalling class which the Coastguard were teaching all last winter. He semaphores Dog’ twice. Flossie is caught and dragged down; the red flag falls, and Number Nine rewards Gorman with a magpie, — perfect elevation too. She must be feeling well to-day, — the old beast!

To Gorman succeeds Lauder of the Coastguard, — trim, alert, and brown. He gets in his five rounds Navy-fashion: fitting the rough ground as though he were poured into it. He and Purvis are full members of the Club. They can make or mend anything from a new wind-flag to an old target; and their uniforms give us a pleasant air of official responsibility. The Admiralty decree that Coastguards shall fire so many rounds a year, but do not supply a range. They serve out tins stuffed with cordite chips, which they call ‘reduced charge’ cartridges. A rude target is then painted on the cliffs, and our Coastguards blaze off at two hundred yards; using the seven-hundred-yard sight! (If this should meet the eye of the Admiralty, they may be interested to know that — for a consideration — we should be most happy to open the range to neighbouring Coastguards.) For the next hour or so we cut in and out like men at whist. Lauder gives place to Scott, the baker’s son; Scott is followed by Keeley, son of a farmer; then comes Fane, the black-smith’s assistant; Anderson, the butcher; a mechanic or two; a member from Brighton (he has cycled over five miles in the teeth of this wind, but shoots none the less closely); and half-a-dozen others. A man from Burma on sick leave, his fingers itching for the feel of the trigger again; the Vicar, an Australian, and a schoolmaster make up the gallery.

‘No more for the Bisley bull?’ says the Sergeant. ‘Then go back to six hundred. The wind’s dropping! Up flags! Quick!’ ‘Please, Sergeant, mayn’t I try a shot at six hundred?’ says a man newly emancipated from the Morris tube. We do not allow men to begin even at two hundred till they are dismissed their tube-course in thevillagedrill-shed. ‘Not yet,’ is the answer. ‘We’ll give you another turn at the Two-hundred first. You had beginner’s luck to-day.’ The man obeys without protest (you are not encouraged to argue with our Sergeant), but follows up the range, for the sight and the talk of the game lay strong hold upon him. Even our substitute postman (our permanent man is at the Front), who has not yet fired twenty shots with the Morris tube, spends his rare leisure here, listening and looking and learning. One can pick up knowledge for the asking, when the light is good, and the experts come down and lie down and demonstrate.

Over the hill, his rifle cased, walks Vansittart, a man of leisure, with a dozen years’ experience of shooting, — all at the service of the Club. He attends our days as though it were his one business in life, and his advice to the colts is invaluable. He drops beside young Dixon, who has just slipped away from the frieze of huge farm-horses filing home against the skyline to the left. We have hopes of Dixon the farm-hand, for he has good knowledge of the lights and shadows tinder which he spends most of his life. He has never missed a drill or a shoot, or spoken an unnecessary word, since the Club began. The wind at the firing-point has fallen, but it still trickles up and down the valley in heart-breaking fashion. Vansittart’s eye is on the wind-flag, which we others are apt to regard as mere ornament, and he follows the changes with some seventh sense denied to beginners. Then he falls back with young Keeley and two or three others, to whom the mystery of wind-allowance is not so black as it once was, — and they work it all out together at ease on the turf. The Sergeant checks each shot, explains, suggests, and, on occasion, casts himself down alongside to show by example. Hear his wisdom: — ‘It wasn’t the rifle’s fault; give her to me. There you are! The direction’s perfect, but you’ve been dropping your muzzle.’ It is absurdly easy to get a bull when you have mastered the Sergeant’s secret. He tells it to one concerned in these very words: — ‘You hang too long, and when you hang you wobble. Never mind when she’s going off,—keep your eye on the aim. Don’t drop your muzzle, and don’t pull at her. Press her! Press her!’ Or thus: — ‘Left again! Oh, you drive — that’s what it is. Your left’s your master-hand. Try not to give that near-side jerk when you loose off. She’ll throw to the near on her own account.’ This is to Maxwell, our local flyman, who, with the trainer’s son, has hurried up in the garments of his calling. The box-cloth gaiters twitch uneasily as he strives to overcome a professional instinct to pull to the near. Oddly enough, the trainer’s son, though his hands are yet red from the reins (the three-year-old did pull after all!), shoots as straight as a die. Then Jimmy the Crack lies down to fight it off with Gorman, who, having unloaded Number Nine on an innocent friend, has been lying low for Jimmy all the afternoon. Jimmy comes to us from the high veldt so to speak, — from a little lonely village in the Downs, where there may have been rabbits. At any rate he can shoot. He said the other day before some twenty of us: — ‘If a man smokes or drinks he is no good at this game.’ Then he turned on his belly and drave home bulls to clinch the sermon. A thousand tracts could not have taught us more. But Gorman in the blue jean overalls has the level eye and the steady hand of the mechanician, and in a few weeks there should not be much to choose between him and Jimmy.

Last of all — he has business in London all the week, and comes down specially early on Saturdays to do his turn — young Foster, son of the local innkeeper, bicycles over the hill. Vansittart snaps his sight down and turns to watch. This is important, for Foster, Gorman, and Jimmy may represent us if ever we dare to enter for the Spectator’s prize at Bisley. The light softens as the day and the wind go down together, the Channel recovers its unbroken blue, and the young thyme gives out the first true smell of summer. We are all quiet now, except Tim, the terrier, digging a field-mouse with squeakings somewhere on the edge of a wheatfield. ‘Get back from behind the sights!’ The Sergeant raises a warning hand. We tiptoe backwards and squat like partridges. They are proudstomached men, these three cracks. They are not grateful, as some others, for a chance-won magpie. If they get an inner, even, they scowl and the Sergeant scowls, and they ask why they ‘dropped’ so badly. ‘Bull, Gorman! Foster, bull—five! Jimmy—high—oh, high! Inner, high, right! Gorman, inner! Hold a minute till I get my glasses. That was bad, Gorman. Remember the light’s changing every minute. Foster—bull again! Good! Now, Jimmy, your last!’ . . . It is a hang-fire — a bad one, too — and you can hear our quick indrawn ‘Ah!’ of sympathy as Jimmy’s last goes away to the right. This ends the regular work, and the Club sits on the faulty cartridge, giving its opinion of Dum-dums and Service ammunition with entire lucidity. A member hands in a new rifle — his very own — to be shot for sighting; and while the Sergeant puts her through her paces, and a couple of us gamble for cartridges (five shots at six hundred; loser to pay for the whole packet), the Committee, cleaning out its rifles, discusses the terms of a challenge that has come in from the Newhaven Volunteer Engineers. We know nothing of their record — though we have all taken to reading the scores of local clubs, a fact which country editors should note — but we fear the worst. ‘Oh, take ’em on,’ says the Vicar. ‘They won’t do more than beat us. What do you think, Sergeant?’ The Sergeant smiles, but guarantees nothing. He led us to victory against an Essex Volunteer team. He will see to it that we turn out the best eight we have, and the rest is with Allah’s wind and sun and cloud. ‘Ye-es, take ’em on,’ says the Sergeant, and packs away the spare ammunition. The red flag slides down behind the butts, and we stroll home by twos and threes through the everlasting English twilight, explaining, arguing, chaffing, and reshooting every shot. This game has enlarged the skirts of our understanding. Whether we like it or not, we must, when we black our sights, for instance, learn a little neat-handedness; when we meet a visiting team we must entertain them as men of the world: when we use the verniers we must think with an approach to precision and when we wish to describe what is the matter with our shooting we must speak to the point and quickly. Our mistakes are all our own, — pitilessly signalled from the trenches on the echo of each shot. If we lose our tempers, the target will not answer back; we cannot impress the unseen markers by our rank, wealth, or achievement in the world without. They will credit us precisely with what we make, — neither more nor less; and our companions at the firing-point, who now know us very well, will do the same. We cannot patronise any one except a rank duffer fresh from the Morris tube (and he may beat our head off in a month), we dare not tell or act a lie; and if we have a weakness for excess in any shape, the score-book will check us off as scientifically as a German penologist. Unlike cricket, football, lawn-tennis, or fives, any man can play the game; for here, no more than on the high veldt, will the discreet bullet tell its billet whether the despatcher was old, unlovely, poor, weak, or ill-clad.

There are those who say: ‘Ah, but wait till this war-fever dies down, and then the men will get tired of coming down to fire off a gun.’ One hears very little of war-fever on the range, and the wonder (infinitely pathetic in grown men) of being allowed to fire and handle a real live rifle departed long ago. We are enjoying the game for its own sake; because it is sane, and healthy, and quiet (infinitely quieter than a cricket-match), does not knock our daily work to pieces, or necessitate drinks before, during, and after; because it wakes up in us powers whose existence we never dreamed of till now; and because it opens to us a happy new world of interests and ideas, — things that men need as urgently as inland cattle need salt. But if only the range could be open on Sundays!

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FOUR men, each entitled to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’, sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked—for them—one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened till it was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at each stroke. Outside lay gloom of a November day in London. There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon—nothing but a brown purple haze of heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy.

From time to time clouds of tawny dust rose from the ground without wind or warning, flung themselves tablecloth-wise among the tops of the parched trees, and came down again. Then a-whirling dust-devil would scutter across the plain for a couple of miles, break, and fall outward, though there was nothing to check its flight save a long low line of piled railway-sleepers white with the dust, a cluster of huts made of mud, condemned rails, and canvas, and the one squat four-roomed bungalow that belonged to the assistant engineer in charge of a section of the Gaudhari State line then under construction.

The four, stripped to the thinnest of sleeping-suits, played whist crossly, with wranglings as to leads and returns. It was not the best kind of whist, but they had taken some trouble to arrive at it. Mottram of the Indian Survey had ridden thirty and railed one hundred miles from his lonely post in the desert since the night before; Lowndes of the Civil Service, on special duty in the political department, had come as far to escape for an instant the miserable intrigues of an impoverished native State whose king alternately fawned and blustered for more money from the pitiful revenues contributed by hard-wrung peasants and despairing camel-breeders; Spurstow, the doctor of the line, had left a cholera-stricken camp of coolies to look after itself for forty-eight hours while he associated with white men once more. Hummil, the assistant engineer, was the host. He stood fast and received his friends thus every Sunday if they could come in. When one of them failed to appear, he would send a telegram to his last address, in order that he might know whether the defaulter were dead or alive. There are very many places in the East where it is not good or kind to let your acquaintances drop out of sight even for one short week.

The players were not conscious of any special regard for each other. They squabbled whenever they met; but they ardently desired to meet, as men without water desire to drink. They were lonely folk who understood the dread meaning of loneliness. They were all under thirty years of age—which is too soon for any man to possess that knowledge.

‘Pilsener?’ said Spurstow, after the second rubber, mopping his forehead.

‘Beer’s out, I’m sorry to say, and there’s hardly enough soda-water for tonight,’ said Hummil.

‘What filthy bad management!’ Spurstow snarled.

‘Can’t help it. I’ve written and wired; but the trains don’t come through regularly yet. Last week the ice ran out—as Lowndes knows.’

‘Glad I didn’t come. I could ha’ sent you some if I had known, though. Phew! it’s too hot to go on playing bumblepuppy.’ This with a savage scowl at Lowndes, who only laughed. He was a hardened offender.

Mottram rose from the table and looked out of a chink in the shutters.

‘What a sweet day!’ said he.

The company yawned all together and betook themselves to an aimless investigation of all Hummil’s possessions—guns, tattered novels, saddlery, spurs, and the like. They had fingered them a score of times before, but there was really nothing else to do.

‘Got anything fresh?’ said Lowndes.

‘Last week’s Gazette of India, and a cutting from a home paper. My father sent it out. It’s rather amusing.’

‘One of those vestrymen that call ’emselves M.P.s again, is it?’ said Spurstow, who read his newspapers when he could get them.

‘Yes. Listen to this. It’s to your address, Lowndes. The man was making a speech to his constituents, and he piled it on. Here’s a sample, “And I assert unhesitatingly that the Civil Service in India is the preserve—the pet preserve—of the aristocracy of England. What does the democracy—what do the masses—get from that country, which we have step by step fraudulently annexed? I answer, nothing whatever. It is farmed with a single eye to their own interests by the scions of the aristocracy. They take good care to maintain their lavish scale of incomes, to avoid or stifle any inquiries into the nature and conduct of their administration, while they themselves force the unhappy peasant to pay with the sweat of his brow for all the luxuries in which they are lapped.” ’ Hummil waved the cutting above his head. ‘’Ear! ’ear!’ said his audience.

Then Lowndes, meditatively, ‘I’d give—I’d give three months’ pay to have that gentleman spend one month with me and see how the free and independent native prince works things. Old Timbersides’—this was his flippant title for an honoured and decorated feudatory prince—‘has been wearing my life out this week past for money. By Jove, his latest performance was to send me one of his women as a bribe!’

‘Good for you! Did you accept it?’ said Mottram.

‘No. I rather wish I had, now. She was a pretty little person, and she yarned away to me about the horrible destitution among the king’s women-folk. The darlings haven’t had any new clothes for nearly a month, and the old man wants to buy a new drag from Calcutta—solid silver railings and silver lamps, and trifles of that kind. I’ve tried to make him understand that he has played the deuce with the revenues for the last twenty years and must go slow. He can’t see it.’

‘But he has the ancestral treasure-vaults to draw on. There must be three millions at least in jewels and coin under his palace,’ said Hummil.

‘Catch a native king disturbing the family treasure! The priests forbid it except as the last resort. Old Timbersides has added something like a quarter of a million to the deposit in his reign.’

‘Where the mischief does it all come from?’ said Mottram.

‘The country. The state of the people is enough to make you sick. I’ve known the taxmen wait by a milch-camel till the foal was born and then hurry off the mother for arrears. And what can I do? I can’t get the court clerks to give me any accounts; I can’t raise anything more than a fat smile from the commander-in-chief when I find out the troops are three months in arrears; and old Timbersides begins to weep when I speak to him. He has taken to the King’s Peg heavily, liqueur brandy for whisky, and Heidsieck for soda-water.’

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‘That’s what the Rao of Jubela took to. Even a native can’t last long at that,’ said Spurstow. ‘He’ll go out.’

‘And a good thing, too. Then I suppose we’ll have a council of regency, and a tutor for the young prince, and hand him back his kingdom with ten years’ accumulations.’

‘Whereupon that young prince, having been taught all the vices of the English, will play ducks and drakes with the money and undo ten years’ work in eighteen months. I’ve seen that business before,’ said Spurstow. ‘I should tackle the king with a light hand if I were you, Lowndes. They’ll hate you quite enough under any circumstances.

‘That’s all very well. The man who looks on can talk about the light hand; but you can’t clean a pig-sty with a pen dipped in rose-water. I know my risks; but nothing has happened yet. My servant’s an old Pathan, and he cooks for me. They are hardly likely to bribe him, and I don’t accept food from my true friends, as they call themselves. Oh, but it’s weary work! I’d sooner be with you, Spurstow. There’s shooting near your camp.’

‘Would you? I don’t think it. About fifteen deaths a day don’t incite a man to shoot anything but himself. And the worst of it is that the poor devils look at you as though you ought to save them. Lord knows, I’ve tried everything. My last attempt was empirical, but it pulled an old man through. He was brought to me apparently past hope, and I gave him gin and Worcester sauce with cayenne. It cured him; but I don’t recommend it.’

‘How do the cases run generally?’ said Hummil.

‘Very simply indeed. Chlorodyne, opium pill, chlorodyne, collapse, nitre, bricks to the feet, and then—the burning-ghaut. The last seems to be the only thing that stops the trouble. It’s black cholera, you know. Poor devils! But, I will say, little Bunsee Lal, my apothecary, works like a demon. I’ve recommended him for promotion if he comes through it all alive.’

‘And what are your chances, old man?’ said Mottram.

‘Don’t know; don’t care much; but I’ve sent the letter in. What are you doing with yourself generally?’

‘Sitting under a table in the tent and spitting on the sextant to keep it cool,’ said the man of the survey. ‘Washing my eyes to avoid ophthalmia, which I shall certainly get, and trying to make a sub-surveyor understand that an error of five degrees in an angle isn’t quite so small as it looks. I’m altogether alone, y’ know, and shall be till the end of the hot weather.’

‘Hummil’s the lucky man,’ said Lowndes, flinging himself into a long chair. ‘He has an actual roof – torn as to the ceiling-cloth, but still a roof – over his head. He sees one train daily. He can get beer and soda-water and ice ’em when God is good. He has books, pictures—they were torn from the Graphic—and the society of the excellent sub-contractor Jevins, besides the pleasure of receiving us weekly.’

Hummil smiled grimly. ‘Yes, I’m the lucky man, I suppose. Jevins is luckier.’

‘How? Not——’

‘Yes. Went out. Last Monday.’

‘By his own hand?’ said Spurstow quickly, hinting the suspicion that was in everybody’s mind. There was no cholera near Hummil’s section. Even fever gives a man at least a week’s grace, and sudden death generally implied self-slaughter.

‘I judge no man this weather,’ said Hummil. ‘He had a touch of the sun, I fancy; for last week, after you fellows had left, he came into the verandah and told me that he was going home to see his wife, in Market Street, Liverpool, that evening.

‘I got the apothecary in to look at him, and we tried to make him lie down. After an hour or two he rubbed his eyes and said he believed he had had a fit, hoped he hadn’t said anything rude. Jevins had a great idea of bettering himself socially. He was very like Chucks in his language.’

‘Well?’

‘Then he went to his own bungalow and began cleaning a rifle. He told the servant that he was going to shoot buck in the morning. Naturally he fumbled with the trigger, and shot himself through the head—accidentally. The apothecary sent in a report to my chief; and Jevins is buried somewhere out there. I’d have wired to you, Spurstow, if you could have done anything.’

‘You’re a queer chap,’ said Mottram. ‘If you’d killed the man yourself you couldn’t have been more quiet about the business.’

‘Good Lord! what does it matter?’ said Hummil calmly. ‘I’ve got to do a lot of his overseeing work in addition to my own. I’m the only person that suffers. Jevins is out of it, by pure accident, of course, but out of it. The apothecary was going to write a long screed on suicide. Trust a babu to drivel when he gets the chance.’

‘Why didn’t you let it go in as suicide?’ said Lowndes.

‘No direct proof. A man hasn’t many privileges in his country, but he might at least be allowed to mishandle his own rifle. Besides, some day I may need a man to smother up an accident to myself. Live and let live. Die and let die.’

‘You take a pill,’ said Spurstow, who had been watching Hummil’s white face narrowly. ‘Take a pill, and don’t be an ass. That sort of talk is skittles. Anyhow, suicide is shirking your work. If I were Job ten times over, I should be so interested in what was going to happen next that I’d stay on and watch.’

‘Ah! I’ve lost that curiosity,’ said Hummil.

‘Liver out of order?’ said Lowndes feelingly.

‘No. Can’t sleep. That’s worse.’

‘By Jove, it is!’ said Mottram. ‘I’m that way every now and then, and the fit has to wear itself out. What do you take for it?’

‘Nothing. What’s the use? I haven’t had ten minutes’ sleep since Friday morning.’

‘Poor chap! Spurstow, you ought to attend to this,’ said Mottram. ‘Now you mention it, your eyes are rather gummy and swollen.’

Spurstow, still watching Hummil, laughed lightly. ‘I’ll patch him up, later on. Is it too hot, do you think, to go for a ride?’

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‘Where to?’ said Lowndes wearily. ‘We shall have to go away at eight, and there’ll be riding enough for us then. I hate a horse when I have to use him as a necessity. Oh, heavens! What is there to do?’

‘Begin whist again, at chick points [‘a chick’ is supposed to be eight shillings] and a gold mohur on the rub,’ said Spurstow promptly.

‘Poker. A month’s pay all round for the pool—no limit—and fifty-rupee raises. Somebody would be broken before we got up,’ said Lowndes.

‘Can’t say that it would give me any pleasure to break any man in this company,’ said Mottram. ‘There isn’t enough excitement in it, and it’s foolish.’ He crossed over to the worn and battered little camp-piano—wreckage of a married household that had once held the bungalow—and opened the case.

‘It’s used up long ago,’ said Hummil. ‘The servants have picked it to pieces.’

The piano was indeed hopelessly out of order, but Mottram managed to bring the rebellious notes into a sort of agreement, and there rose from the ragged keyboard something that might once have been the ghost of a popular music-hall song. The men in the long chairs turned with evident interest as Mottram banged the more lustily.

‘That’s good!’ said Lowndes. ‘By Jove! the last time I heard that song was in ’79, or thereabouts, just before I came out.’

‘Ah!’ said Spurstow with pride, ‘I was home in ‘80.’ And he mentioned a song of the streets popular at that date.

Mottram executed it roughly. Lowndes criticized and volunteered emendations. Mottram dashed into another ditty, not of the music-hall character, and made as if to rise.

‘Sit down,’ said Hummil. ‘I didn’t know that you had any music in your composition. Go on playing until you can’t think of anything more. I’ll have that piano tuned up before you come again. Play something festive.’

Very simple indeed were the tunes to which Mottram’s art and the limitations of the piano could give effect, but the men listened with pleasure, and in the pauses talked all together of what they had seen or heard when they were last at home. A dense dust-storm sprung up outside, and swept roaring over the house, enveloping it in the choking darkness of midnight, but Mottram continued unheeding, and the crazy tinkle reached the ears of the listeners above the flapping of the tattered ceiling-cloth.

In the silence after the storm he glided from the more directly personal songs of Scotland, half humming them as he played, into the Evening Hymn.

‘Sunday,’ said he, nodding his head.

‘Go on. Don’t apologize for it,’ said Spurstow.

Hummil laughed long and riotously. ‘Play it, by all means. You’re full of surprises today. I didn’t know you had such a gift of finished sarcasm. How does that thing go?’

Mottram took up the tune.

‘Too slow by half. You miss the note of gratitude,’ said Hummil. ‘It ought to go to the “Grasshopper’s Polka”—this way.’ And he chanted, prestissimo,

‘Glory to thee, my God, this night, For all the blessings of the light.—That shows we really feel our blessings. How does it go on?—If in the night I sleepless lie, My soul with sacred thoughts supply; May no ill dreams disturb my rest,—Quicker, Mottram!—Or powers of darkness me molest!’

‘Bah! what an old hypocrite you are!’

‘Don’t be an ass,’ said Lowndes. ‘You are at full liberty to make fun of anything else you like, but leave that hymn alone. It’s associated in my mind with the most sacred recollections——’

‘Summer evenings in the country, stained-glass window, light going out, and you and she jamming your heads together over one hymnbook,’ said Mottram.

‘Yes, and a fat old cockchafer hitting you in the eye when you walked home. Smell of hay, and a moon as big as a bandbox sitting on the top of a haycock; bats, roses, milk and midges,’ said Lowndes.

‘Also mothers. I can just recollect my mother singing me to sleep with that when I was a little chap,’ said Spurstow.

The darkness had fallen on the room. They could hear Hummil squirming in his chair.

‘Consequently,’ said he testily, ‘you sing it when you are seven fathom deep in Hell! It’s an insult to the intelligence of the Deity to pretend we’re anything but tortured rebels.’

‘Take two pills,’ said Spurstow; ‘that’s tortured liver.’

‘The usually placid Hummil is in a vile bad temper. I’m sorry for his coolies tomorrow,’ said Lowndes, as the servants brought in the lights and prepared the table for dinner.

As they were settling into their places about the miserable goat-chops, and the smoked tapioca pudding, Spurstow took occasion to whisper to Mottram, ‘Well done, David!’

‘Look after Saul, then,’ was the reply.

‘What are you two whispering about?’ said Hummil suspiciously.

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‘Only saying that you are a damned poor host. This fowl can’t be cut,’ returned Spurstow with a sweet smile. ‘Call this a dinner?’

‘I can’t help it. You don’t expect a banquet, do you?’

Throughout that meal Hummil contrived laboriously to insult directly and pointedly all his guests in succession, and at each insult Spurstow kicked the aggrieved person under the table; but he dared not exchange a glance of intelligence with either of them. Hummil’s face was white and pinched, while his eyes were unnaturally large. No man dreamed for a moment of resenting his savage personalities, but as soon as the meal was over they made haste to get away.

‘Don’t go. You’re just getting amusing, you fellows. I hope I haven’t said anything that annoyed you. You’re such touchy devils.’ Then, changing the note into one of almost abject entreaty, Hummil added, ‘I say, you surely aren’t going?’

‘In the language of the blessed Jorrocks, where I dines I sleeps,’ said Spurstow. ‘I want to have a look at your coolies tomorrow, if you don’t mind. You can give me a place to lie down in, I suppose?’

The others pleaded the urgency of their several duties next day, and, saddling up, departed together, Hummil begging them to come next Sunday. As they jogged off, Lowndes unbosomed himself to Mottram—

‘. . . And I never felt so like kicking a man at his own table in my life. He said I cheated at whist, and reminded me I was in debt! ’Told you you were as good as a liar to your face! You aren’t half indignant enough over it.’

‘Not I,’ said Mottram. ‘Poor devil! Did you ever know old Hummy behave like that before or within a hundred miles of it?’

‘That’s no excuse. Spurstow was hacking my shin all the time, so I kept a hand on myself. Else I should have—’

‘No, you wouldn’t. You’d have done as Hummy did about Jevins; judge no man this weather. By Jove! the buckle of my bridle is hot in my hand! Trot out a bit, and ‘ware rat-holes.’ Ten minutes’ trotting jerked out of Lowndes one very sage remark when he pulled up, sweating from every pore—

“Good thing Spurstow’s with him tonight.’

‘Ye-es. Good man, Spurstow. Our roads turn here. See you again next Sunday, if the sun doesn’t bowl me over.’

‘S’pose so, unless old Timbersides’ finance minister manages to dress some of my food. Goodnight, and—God bless you!’

‘What’s wrong now?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ Lowndes gathered up his whip, and, as he flicked Mottram’s mare on the flank, added, ‘You’re not a bad little chap, that’s all.’ And the mare bolted half a mile across the sand, on the word.

In the assistant engineer’s bungalow Spurstow and Hummil smoked the pipe of silence together, each narrowly watching the other. The capacity of a bachelor’s establishment is as elastic as its arrangements are simple. A servant cleared away the dining-room table, brought in a couple of rude native bedsteads made of tape strung on a light wood frame, flung a square of cool Calcutta matting over each, set them side by side, pinned two towels to the punkah so that their fringes should just sweep clear of the sleeper’s nose and mouth, and announced that the couches were ready.

The men flung themselves down, ordering the punkah-coolies by all the powers of Hell to pull. Every door and window was shut, for the outside air was that of an oven. The atmosphere within was only 104 degrees, as the thermometer bore witness, and heavy with the foul smell of badly-trimmed kerosene lamps; and this stench, combined with that of native tobacco, baked brick, and dried earth, sends the heart of many a strong man down to his boots, for it is the smell of the Great Indian Empire when she turns herself for six months into a house of torment. Spurstow packed his pillows craftily so that he reclined rather than lay, his head at a safe elevation above his feet. It is not good to sleep on a low pillow in the hot weather if you happen to be of thick-necked build, for you may pass with lively snores and gugglings from natural sleep into the deep slumber of heat-apoplexy.

‘Pack your pillows,’ said the doctor sharply, as he saw Hummil preparing to lie down at full length.

The night-light was trimmed; the shadow of the punkah wavered across the room, and the flick  of the punkah-towel and the soft whine of the rope through the wall-hole followed it. Then the punkah flagged, almost ceased. The sweat poured from Spurstow’s brow. Should he go out and harangue the coolie? It started forward again with a savage jerk, and a pin came out of the towels. When this was replaced, a tomtom in the coolie-lines began to beat with the steady throb of a swollen artery inside some brain-fevered skull. Spurstow turned on his side and swore gently. There was no movement on Hummil’s part. The man had composed himself as rigidly as a corpse, his hands clinched at his sides. The respiration was too hurried for any suspicion of sleep. Spurstow looked at the set face. The jaws were clinched, and there was a pucker round the quivering eyelids.

‘He’s holding himself as tightly as ever he can,’ thought Spurstow. ‘What in the world is the matter with him?—Hummil!’

‘Yes,’ in a thick constrained voice.

‘Can’t you get to sleep?’

‘No.’

‘Head hot? Throat feeling bulgy? or how?’

‘Neither, thanks. I don’t sleep much, you know.’

‘’Feel pretty bad?’

‘Pretty bad, thanks. There is a tomtom outside, isn’t there? I thought it was my head at first…. Oh, Spurstow, for pity’s sake give me something that will put me asleep, sound asleep, if it’s only for six hours!’ He sprang up, trembling from head to foot. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep naturally for days, and I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!’

‘Poor old chap!’

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‘That’s no use. Give me something to make me sleep. I tell you I’m nearly mad. I don’t know what I say half my time. For three weeks I’ve had to think and spell out every word that has come through my lips before I dared say it. Isn’t that enough to drive a man mad? I can’t see things correctly now, and I’ve lost my sense of touch. My skin aches—my skin aches! Make me sleep. Oh, Spurstow, for the love of God make me sleep sound. It isn’t enough merely to let me dream. Let me sleep!’

‘All right, old man, all right. Go slow; you aren’t half as bad as you think.’

The flood-gates of reserve once broken, Hummil was clinging to him like a frightened child. ‘You’re pinching my arm to pieces.’

‘I’ll break your neck if you don’t do something for me. No, I didn’t mean that. Don’t be angry, old fellow.’ He wiped the sweat off himself as he fought to regain composure. ‘I’m a bit restless and off my oats, and perhaps you could recommend some sort of sleeping mixture—bromide of potassium.’

‘Bromide of skittles! Why didn’t you tell me this before? Let go of my arm, and I’ll see if there’s anything in my cigarette-case to suit your complaint.’ Spurstow hunted among his day-clothes, turned up the lamp, opened a little silver cigarette-case, and advanced on the expectant Hummil with the daintiest of fairy squirts.

‘The last appeal of civilization,’ said he, ’and a thing I hate to use. Hold out your arm. Well, your sleeplessness hasn’t ruined your muscle; and what a thick hide it is! Might as well inject a buffalo subcutaneously. Now in a few minutes the morphia will begin working. Lie down and wait.’

A smile of unalloyed and idiotic delight began to creep over Hummil’s face. ‘I think,’ he whispered,—‘I think I’m going off now. Gad! it’s positively heavenly! Spurstow, you must give me that case to keep; you——’ The voice ceased as the head fell back.

‘Not for a good deal,’ said Spurstow to the unconscious form. ‘And now, my friend, sleeplessness of your kind being very apt to relax the moral fibre in little matters of life and death, I’ll just take the liberty of spiking your guns.’

He paddled into Hummil’s saddle-room in his bare feet and uncased a twelve-bore rifle, an express, and a revolver. Of the first he unscrewed the nipples and hid them in the bottom of a saddlery-case; of the second he abstracted the lever, kicking it behind a big wardrobe. The third he merely opened, and knocked the doll-head bolt of the grip up with the heel of a riding-boot.

‘That’s settled,’ he said, as he shook the sweat off his hands. ‘These little precautions will at least give you time to turn. You have too much sympathy with gun-room accidents.’

And as he rose from his knees, the thick muffled voice of Hummil cried in the doorway, ‘You fool!’

Such tones they use who speak in the lucid intervals of delirium to their friends a little before they die.

Spurstow started, dropping the pistol. Hummil stood in the doorway, rocking with helpless laughter.

‘That was awf’ly good of you, I’m sure,’ he said, very slowly, feeling for his words. ‘I don’t intend to go out by my own hand at present. I say, Spurstow, that stuff won’t work. What shall I do? What shall I do?’ And panic terror stood in his eyes.

‘Lie down and give it a chance. Lie down at once.’

‘I daren’t. It will only take me half-way again, and I shan’t be able to get away this time. Do you know it was all I could do to come out just now? Generally I am as quick as lightning; but you had clogged my feet. I was nearly caught.’

‘Oh yes, I understand. Go and lie down.’

‘No, it isn’t delirium; but it was an awfully mean trick to play on me. Do you know I might have died?’

As a sponge rubs a slate clean, so some power unknown to Spurstow had wiped out of Hummil’s face all that stamped it for the face of a man, and he stood at the doorway in the expression of his lost innocence. He had slept back into terrified childhood.

‘Is he going to die on the spot?’ thought Spurstow. Then, aloud, ‘All right, my son. Come back to bed, and tell me all about it. You couldn’t sleep; but what was all the rest of the nonsense?’

‘A place, a place down there,’ said Hummil, with simple sincerity. The drug was acting on him by waves, and he was flung from the fear of a strong man to the fright of a child as his nerves gathered sense or were dulled.

‘Good God! I’ve been afraid of it for months past, Spurstow. It has made every night hell to me; and yet I’m not conscious of having done anything wrong.’

‘Be still, and I’ll give you another dose. We’ll stop your nightmares, you unutterable idiot!’

‘Yes, but you must give me so much that I can’t get away. You must make me quite sleepy, not just a little sleepy. It’s so hard to run then.’

‘I know it; I know it. I’ve felt it myself. The symptoms are exactly as you describe.’

‘Oh, don’t laugh at me, confound you! Before this awful sleeplessness came to me I’ve tried to rest on my elbow and put a spur in the bed to sting me when I fell back. Look!’

‘By Jove! the man has been rowelled like a horse! Ridden by the nightmare with a vengeance! And we all thought him sensible enough. Heaven send us understanding! You like to talk, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sometimes. Not when I’m frightened. Then I want to run. Don’t you?’

‘Always. Before I give you your second dose try to tell me exactly what your trouble is.’

Hummil spoke in broken whispers for nearly ten minutes, whilst Spurstow looked into the pupils of his eyes and passed his hand before them once or twice.

At the end of the narrative the silver cigarette-case was produced, and the last words that Hummil said as he fell back for the second time were, ‘Put me quite to sleep; for if I’m caught I die, I die!’

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‘Yes, yes; we all do that sooner or later, thank Heaven who has set a term to our miseries,’ said Spurstow, settling the cushions under the head. ‘It occurs to me that unless I drink something I shall go out before my time. I’ve stopped sweating, and—I wear a seventeen-inch collar.’ He brewed himself scalding hot tea, which is an excellent remedy against heat-apoplexy if you take three or four cups of it in time. Then he watched the sleeper.

‘A blind face that cries and can’t wipe its eyes, a blind face that chases him down corridors! H’m! Decidedly, Hummil ought to go on leave as soon as possible; and, sane or otherwise, he undoubtedly did rowel himself most cruelly. Well, Heaven send us understanding!’

At mid-day Hummil rose, with an evil taste in his mouth, but an unclouded eye and a joyful heart.

‘I was pretty bad last night, wasn’t I?’ said he.

‘I have seen healthier men. You must have had a touch of the sun. Look here: if I write you a swinging medical certificate, will you apply for leave on the spot?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? You want it.’

‘Yes, but I can hold on till the weather’s a little cooler.’

‘Why should you, if you can get relieved on the spot?’

‘Burkett is the only man who could be sent; and he’s a born fool.’

‘Oh, never mind about the line. You aren’t so important as all that. Wire for leave, if necessary.’

Hummil looked very uncomfortable.

‘I can hold on till the Rains,’ he said evasively.

‘You can’t. Wire to headquarters for Burkett.’

‘I won’t. If you want to know why, particularly, Burkett is married, and his wife’s just had a kid, and she’s up at Simla, in the cool, and Burkett has a very nice billet that takes him into Simla from Saturday to Monday. That little woman isn’t at all well. If Burkett was transferred she’d try to follow him. If she left the baby behind she’d fret herself to death. If she came—and Burkett’s one of those selfish little beasts who are always talking about a wife’s place being with her husband—she’d die. It’s murder to bring a woman here just now. Burkett hasn’t the physique of a rat. If he came here he’d go out; and I know she hasn’t any money, and I’m pretty sure she’d go out too. I’m salted in a sort of way, and I’m not married. Wait till the Rains, and then Burkett can get thin down here. It’ll do him heaps of good.’

‘Do you mean to say that you intend to face—what you have faced, till the Rains break?’

‘Oh, it won’t be so bad, now you’ve shown me a way out of it. I can always wire to you. Besides, now I’ve once got into the way of sleeping, it’ll be all right. Anyhow, I shan’t put in for leave. That’s the long and the short of it.’

‘My great Scott! I thought all that sort of thing was dead and done with.’

‘Bosh! You’d do the same yourself. I feel a new man, thanks to that cigarette-case. You’re going over to camp now, aren’t you?’

‘Yes; but I’ll try to look you up every other day, if I can.’

‘I’m not bad enough for that. I don’t want you to bother. Give the coolies gin and ketchup.’

‘Then you feel all right?’

‘Fit to fight for my life, but not to stand out in the sun talking to you. Go along, old man, and bless you!’

Hummil turned on his heel to face the echoing desolation of his bungalow, and the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself. He had met a similar apparition once before, when he was suffering from overwork and the strain of the hot weather.

‘This is bad—already,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘If the thing slides away from me all in one piece, like a ghost, I shall know it is only my eyes and stomach that are out of order. If it walks—my head is going.’

He approached the figure, which naturally kept at an unvarying distance from him, as is the use of all spectres that are born of overwork. It slid through the house and dissolved into swimming specks within the eyeball as soon as it reached the burning light of the garden. Hummil went about his business till even. When he came in to dinner he found himself sitting at the table. The vision rose and walked out hastily. Except that it cast no shadow it was in all respects real.

No living man knows what that week held for Hummil. An increase of the epidemic kept Spurstow in camp among the coolies, and all he could do was to telegraph to Mottram, bidding him go to the bungalow and sleep there. But Mottram was forty miles away from the nearest telegraph, and knew nothing of anything save the needs of the survey till he met, early on Sunday morning, Lowndes and Spurstow heading towards Hummil’s for the weekly gathering.

‘Hope the poor chap’s in a better temper,’ said the former, swinging himself off his horse at the door. ‘I suppose he isn’t up yet.’

‘I’ll just have a look at him,’ said the doctor. ‘If he’s asleep there’s no need to wake him.’

And an instant later, by the tone of Spurstow’s voice calling upon them to enter, the men knew what had happened. There was no need to wake him.

The punkah was still being pulled over the bed, but Hummil had departed this life at least three hours.

The body lay on its back, hands clinched by the side, as Spurstow had seen it lying seven nights previously. In the staring eyes was written terror beyond the expression of any pen.

Mottram, who had entered behind Lowndes, bent over the dead and touched the forehead lightly with his lips. ‘Oh, you lucky, lucky devil!’ he whispered.

But Lowndes had seen the eyes, and withdrew shuddering to the other side of the room.

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‘Poor chap! poor old chap! And the last time I met him I was angry. Spurstow, we should have watched him. Has he——?’

Deftly Spurstow continued his investigations, ending by a search round the room.

‘No, he hasn’t,’ he snapped. ‘There’s no trace of anything. Call the servants.’

They came, eight or ten of them, whispering and peering over each other’s shoulders.

‘When did your Sahib go to bed?’ said Spurstow.

‘At eleven or ten, we think,’ said Hummil’s personal servant.

‘He was well then? But how should you know?’

‘He was not ill, as far as our comprehension extended. But he had slept very little for three nights. This I know, because I saw him walking much, and specially in the heart of the night.’

As Spurstow was arranging the sheet, a big straight-necked hunting-spur tumbled on the ground. The doctor groaned. The personal servant peeped at the body.

‘What do you think, Chuma?’ said Spurstow, catching the look on the dark face.

‘Heaven-born, in my poor opinion, this that was my master has descended into the Dark Places, and there has been caught because he was not able to escape with sufficient speed. We have the spur for evidence that he fought with Fear. Thus have I seen men of my race do with thorns when a spell was laid upon them to overtake them in their sleeping hours and they dared not sleep.’

‘Chuma, you’re a mud-head. Go out and prepare seals to be set on the Sahib’s property.’

‘God has made the Heaven-born. God has made me. Who are we, to enquire into the dispensations of God? I will bid the other servants hold aloof while you are reckoning the tale of the Sahib’s property. They are all thieves, and would steal.’

‘As far as I can make out, he died from—oh, anything; stoppage of the heart’s action, heat-apoplexy, or some other visitation,’ said Spurstow to his companions. ‘We must make an inventory of his effects, and so on.’

‘He was scared to death,’ insisted Lowndes. ‘Look at those eyes! For pity’s sake don’t let him be buried with them open!’

‘Whatever it was, he’s clear of all the trouble now,’ said Mottram softly.

Spurstow was peering into the open eyes.

‘Come here,’ said he. ‘Can you see anything there?’

‘I can’t face it!’ whimpered Lowndes. ‘Cover up the face! Is there any fear on earth that can turn a man into that likeness? It’s ghastly. Oh, Spurstow, cover it up!’

‘No fear—on earth,’ said Spurstow. Mottram leaned over his shoulder and looked intently.

‘I see nothing except some grey blurs in the pupil. There can be nothing there, you know.’

‘Even so. Well, let’s think. It’ll take half a day to knock up any sort of coffin; and he must have died at midnight. Lowndes, old man, go out and tell the coolies to break ground next to Jevins’s grave. Mottram, go round the house with Chuma and see that the seals are put on things. Send a couple of men to me here, and I’ll arrange.’

The strong-armed servants when they returned to their own kind told a strange story of the doctor Sahib vainly trying to call their master back to life by magic arts—to wit, the holding of a little green box that clicked to each of the dead man’s eyes, and of a bewildered muttering on the part of the doctor Sahib, who took the little green box away with him.

The resonant hammering of a coffin-lid is no pleasant thing to hear, but those who have experience maintain that much more terrible is the soft swish of the bed-linen, the reeving and unreeving of the bed-tapes, when he who has fallen by the roadside is apparelled for burial, sinking gradually as the tapes are tied over, till the swaddled shape touches the floor and there is no protest against the indignity of hasty disposal.

At the last moment Lowndes was seized with scruples of conscience. ‘Ought you to read the service, from beginning to end?’ said he to Spurstow.

‘I intend to. You’re my senior as a civilian. You can take it if you like.’

‘I didn’t mean that for a moment. I only thought if we could get a chaplain from somewhere, I’m willing to ride anywhere, and give poor Hummil a better chance. That’s all.’

‘Bosh!’ said Spurstow, as he framed his lips to the tremendous words that stand at the head of the burial service.

After breakfast they smoked a pipe in silence to the memory of the dead. Then Spurstow said absently—

‘Tisn’t medical science.’

‘What?’

‘Things in a dead man’s eye.’

‘For goodness’ sake leave that horror alone!’ said Lowndes. ‘I’ve seen a native die of pure fright when a tiger chivied him. I know what killed Hummil.’

‘The deuce you do! I’m going to try to see.’ And the doctor retreated into the bathroom with a Kodak camera. After a few minutes there was the sound of something being hammered to pieces, and he emerged, very white indeed.

‘Have you got a picture?’ said Mottram. ‘What does the thing look like?’

‘It was impossible, of course. You needn’t look, Mottram. I’ve torn up the films. There was nothing there. It was impossible.’

‘That,’ said Lowndes, very distinctly, watching the shaking hand striving to relight the pipe, ‘is a damned lie.’

Mottram laughed uneasily. ‘Spurstow’s right,’ he said. ‘We’re all in such a state now that we’d believe anything. For pity’s sake let’s try to be rational.’

There was no further speech for a long time. The hot wind whistled without, and the dry trees sobbed. Presently the daily train, winking brass, burnished steel, and spouting steam, pulled up panting in the intense glare. ‘We’d better go on that,’ said Spurstow. ‘Go back to work. I’ve written my certificate. We can’t do any more good here, and work’ll keep our wits together. Come on.’

No one moved. It is not pleasant to face railway journeys at mid-day in June. Spurstow gathered up his hat and whip, and, turning in the doorway, said—

‘There may be Heaven—there must be Hell. Meantime, there is our life here. We-ell?’

Neither Mottram nor Lowndes had any answer to the question.

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IF you remember my improper friend Brugglesmith, you will also bear in mind his friend McPhee, Chief Engineer of the Breslau, whose dinghy Brugglesmith tried to steal. His apologies for the performances of Brugglesmith may one day be told in their proper place: the tale before us concerns McPhee. He was never a racing engineer, and took special pride in saying as much before the Liverpool men; but he had a thirty-two years’ knowledge of machinery and the humours of ships. One side of his face had been wrecked through the bursting of a water-gauge in the days when men knew less than they do now; and his nose rose grandly out of the wreck, like a club in a public riot. There were cuts and lumps on his head, and he would guide your forefinger through his short iron-gray hair and tell you how he had come by his trade-marks. He owned all sorts of certificates of extra-competency, and at the bottom of his cabin chest of drawers, where he kept the photograph of his wife, were two or three Royal Humane Society medals for saving lives at sea. Professionally—it was different when crazy steerage-passengers jumped overboard—professionally, McPhee does not approve of saving life at sea, and he has often told me that a new hell is awaiting stokers and trimmers who sign for a strong man’s pay and fall sick the second day out. He believes in throwing boots at fourth and fifth engineers when they wake him up at night with word that a bearing is red-hot, all because a lamp’s glare is reflected red from the twirling metal. He believes that there are only two poets in the world: one being Robert Burns of course, and the other Gerald Massey. When he has time for novels he reads Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade—chiefly the latter—and knows whole pages of Hard Cash by heart. In the saloon his table is next to the captain’s, and he drinks only water while his engines work.He was good to me when we first met, because I did not ask questions, and believed in Charles Reade as a most shamefully neglected author. Later he approved of my writings to the extent of one pamphlet of twenty-four pages that I wrote for Holdock, Steiner, and Chase, owners of the line, when they bought some ventilating patent and fitted it to the cabins of the Breslau, Spandau, and Koltzau. The purser of the Breslau recommended me to Holdock’s secretary for the job; and Holdock, who is a Wesleyan Methodist, invited me to his house, and gave me dinner with the governess when the others had finished, and laced the plans and specifications in my hand, and wrote the pamphlet that same afternoon. It was called ‘Comfort in the Cabin,’ and brought me seven pound ten, cash down—an important sum of money in those days; and the governess, who was teaching Master John Holdock his scales, told me that Mrs. Holdock had told her to keep an eye on me, in case I went away with coats from the hat rack. McPhee liked that pamphlet enormously, for it was composed in the Bouverie-Byzantine style, with baroque and rococo embellishments; and afterward he introduced me to Mrs. McPhee, who succeeded Dinah in my heart; for Dinah was half a world away, and it is wholesome and antiseptic to love such a woman as Janet McPhee. They lived in a little twelve-pound house, close to the shipping. When McPhee was away Mrs. McPhee read the Lloyd’s column in the papers, and called on the wives of senior engineers of equal social standing. Once or twice, too, Mrs. Holdock visited Mrs. McPhee in a brougham with celluloid fittings, and I have reason to believe that, after she had played owner’s wife long enough, they talked scandal. The Holdocks lived in an old-fashioned house with a big brick garden not a mile from the McPhees, for they stayed by their money as their money stayed by them; and in summer you met their brougham solemnly junketing by Theydon Bois or Loughton. But I was Mrs. McPhee’s friend, for she allowed me to convoy her westward, sometimes, to theatres, where she sobbed or laughed or shivered with a simple heart; and she introduced me to a new world of doctors’ wives, captains’ wives, and engineers’ wives, whose whole talk and thought centred in and about ships and lines of ships you have never heard of. There were sailing-ships, with stewards and mahogany and maple saloons, trading to Australia, taking cargoes of consumptives and hopeless drunkards for whom a sea voyage was recommended; there were frouzy little West African boats, full of rats and cockroaches, where men died anywhere but in their bunks; there were Brazilian boats whose cabins could be hired for merchandise that went out loaded nearly awash; there were Zanzibar and Mauritius steamers, and wonderful reconstructed boats that plied to the other side of Borneo. These were loved and known, for they earned our bread and a little butter, and we despised the big Atlantic boats, and made fun of the P.&O. and Orient liners, and swore by our respected owners—Wesleyan, Baptist or Presbyterian, as the case might be.

I had only just come back to England when Mrs. McPhee invited me to dinner at three o’clock in the afternoon, and the notepaper was almost bridal in its scented creaminess. When I reached the house I saw that there were new curtains in the window that must have cost forty-five shillings a pair; and as Mrs. McPhee drew me into the little marble-paper hall, she looked at me keenly, and cried:

‘Have ye not heard? What d’ye think o’ the hat-rack?’

Now, that hat-rack was oak—thirty shillings at least. McPhee came downstairs with a sober foot—he steps as lightly as a cat, for all his weight, when he is at sea—and shook hands in a new and awful manner—a parody of old Holdock’s style when he says good-bye to his skippers. I perceived at once that a legacy had come to him, but I held my peace, though Mrs. McPhee begged me every thirty seconds to eat a great deal and say nothing. It was rather a mad sort of meal, because McPhee and his wife took hold of hands like little children (they always do after voyages), and nodded and winked and choked and gurgled, and hardly ate a mouthful.

A female servant came in and waited; though Mrs. McPhee had told me time and again that she would thank no one to do her housework while she had her health. But this was a servant with a cap, and I saw Mrs. McPhee swell and swell under her garance-coloured gown. There is no small free-board to Janet McPhee, nor is garance any subdued tint; and with all this unexplained pride and glory in the air I felt like watching fireworks without knowing the festival. When the maid had removed the cloth she brought a pineapple that would have cost half a guinea at that season (only McPhee has his own way of getting such things), and a Canton china bowl of dried lichis, and a glass plate of preserved ginger, and a small jar of sacred and imperial chow-chow that perfumed the room. McPhee gets it from a Dutchman in Java, and I think he doctors it with liqueurs. But the crown of the feast was some Madeira of the kind you can only come by if you know the wine and the man. A little maize-wrapped fig of clotted Madeira cigars went with the wine, and the rest was a pale-blue smoky silence; Janet, in her splendour, smiling on us two, and patting McPhee’s hand.

‘We’ll drink,’ said McPhee slowly, rubbing his chin, ‘to the eternal damnation o’ Holdock, Steiner, and Chase.’

Of course I answered ‘Amen,’ though I had made seven pound ten shillings out of the firm. McPhee’s enemies were mine, and I was drinking his Madeira.

‘Ye’ve heard nothing?’ said Janet. ‘Not a word, not a whisper?’

‘Not a word, nor a whisper. On my word, I have not.’

‘Tell him, Mac,’ said she; and that is another proof of Janet’s goodness and wifely love. A smaller woman would have babbled first, but Janet is five feet nine in her stockings.

‘We’re rich,’ said McPhee. I shook hands all round.

‘We’re damned rich,’ he added. I shook hands all round a second time.

page 2

‘I’ll go to sea no more—unless—there’s no sayin’—a private yacht, maybe—wi’, a small an’ handy auxiliary.’

‘It’s not enough for that,’ said Janet. ‘We’re fair rich—well-to-do, but no more. A new gown for church, and one for the theatre. We’ll have it made west.’

‘How much is it?’ I asked.

‘Twenty-five thousand pounds.’ I drew a long breath. ‘An’ I’ve been earnin’ twenty-five an’ twenty pound a month!’ The last words came away with a roar, as though the wide world was conspiring to beat him down.

‘All this time I’m waiting,’ I said. ‘I know nothing since last September. Was it left you?’

They laughed aloud together. ‘It was left,’ said McPhee, choking. ‘Ou, ay, it was left. That’s vara good. Of course it was left. Janet, d’ye note that? It was left. Now if you’d put that in your pamphlet it would have been vara jocose. It was left.’ He slapped his thigh and roared till the wine quivered in the decanter.

The Scotch are a great people, but they are apt to hang over a joke too long, particularly when no one can see the point but themselves.

‘When I rewrite my pamphlet I’ll put it in, McPhee. Only I must know something more first.’

McPhee thought for the length of half a cigar, while Janet caught my eye and led it round the room to one new thing after another—the new vine-pattern carpet, the new chiming rustic clock between the models of the Colombo outrigger-boats, the new inlaid sideboard with a purple cutglass flower-stand, the fender of gilt and brass, and last, the new black-and-gold piano.

‘In October o’ last year the Board sacked me,’ began McPhee. ‘In October o’ last year the Breslau came in for winter overhaul. She’d been runnin’ eight months—two hunder an’ forty days—an’ I was three days makin’ up my indents, when she went to dry-dock. All told, mark you, it was this side o’ three hunder pound—to be preceese, two hunder an’ eighty-six pound four shillings. There’s not another man could ha’ nursed the Breslau for eight months to that tune. Never again—never again! They may send their boats to the bottom, for aught I care.’

‘There’s no need,’ said Janet softly. ‘We’re done wi’ Holdock, Steiner, and Chase.’

‘It’s irritatin’, Janet, it’s just irritatin’. I ha’ been justified from first to last, as the world knows, but—but I canna forgie ’em. Ay, wisdom is justified o’ her children; an’ any other man than me wad ha’ made the indent eight hunder. Hay was our skipper—ye’ll have met him. They shifted him to the Torgau, an’ bade me wait for the Breslau under young Bannister. Ye’ll obsairve there’d been a new election on the Board. I heard the shares were sellin’ hither an’ yon, an’ the major part of the Board was new to me. The old Board would ne’er ha’ done it. They trusted me. But the new Board was all for reorganisation. Young Steiner—Steiner’s son—the Jew, was at the bottom of it, an’ they did not think it worth their while to send me word. The first I knew—an’ I was Chief Engineer—was the notice of the Line’s winter sailin’s, and the Breslau timed for sixteen days between port an’ port! Sixteen days, man! She’s a good boat, but eighteen is her summer time, mark you. Sixteen was sheer flytin’, kitin’ nonsense, an’ so I told young Bannister.

‘“We’ve got to make it,” he said. “Ye should not ha’ sent in a three hunder pound indent.”

‘“Do they look for their boats to be run on air?” I said. “The Board is daft.”

‘“Fen tell ’em so,” he says. “I’m a married man, an’ my fourth’s on the ways now, she says.”’

‘A boy—wi’ red hair,’ Janet put in. Her own hair is the splendid red-gold that goes with a creamy complexion.

‘My word, I was an angry man that day! Forbye I was fond o’ the old Breslau, I looked for a little consideration from the Board after twenty years’ service. There was Board meetin’ on Wednesday; an’ I sat overnight in the engine-room, takin’ figures to support my case. Well, I put it fair and square before them all. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I’ve run the Breslau eight seasons, an’ I believe there’s no fault to find wi’ my wark. But if ye haud to this”—I waggled the advertisement at ’em—“this that I’ve never heard of till I read it at breakfast, I do assure you on my professional reputation, she can never do it. That is to say, she can for a while, but at a risk no thinkin’ man would run.”’

‘“What the deil d’ye suppose we pass your indent for?” says old Holdock. “Man, we’re spendin’ money like watter.”

‘“I’ll leave it in the Board’s hands,” I said, “if two hunder an’ eighty-seven pound is anything beyond right and reason for eight months.” I might ha’ saved my breath, for the Board was new since the last election, an’ there they sat, the damned deevidend-huntin’ ship-chandlers, deaf as the adders o’ Scripture.

‘“We must keep faith wi’ the public,” said young Steiner.

‘“Keep faith wi’ the Breslau then,” I said. “She’s served you well, an’ your father before you. She’ll need her bottom restiffenin’, an’ new bed-plates, an’ turnin’ out the forward boilers, an’ re-borin’ all three cylinders, an’ refacin’ all guides, to begin with. It’s a three months’ job.”

‘“Because one employé is afraid?” says young Steiner. “Maybe a piano in the Chief Engineer’s cabin would be more to the point.”

‘I crushed my cap in my hands, an’ thanked God we’d no bairns an’ a bit put by.

‘“Understand, gentlemen,” I said. “If the Breslau is made a sixteen-day boat, ye’ll find another engineer.”

‘“Bannister makes no objection,” said Holdock.

‘“I’m speakin’ for myself,” I said. “Bannister has bairns.” An’ then I lost my temper. “Ye can run her into Hell an’ out again if ye pay pilotage,” I said, “but ye run without me.”

‘“That’s insolence,” said young Steiner.

‘“At your pleasure,” I said, turnin’ to go.

page 3

‘“Ye can consider yourself dismissed. We must preserve discipline among our employés,” said old Holdock, an’ he looked round to see that the Board was with him. They knew nothin’—God forgie ’em—an’ they nodded me out o’ the Line after twenty years—after twenty years.

‘I went out an’ sat down by the hall porter to get my wits again. I’m thinkin’ I swore at the Board. Then auld McRimmon—o’ McNaughton and McRimmon—came oot o’ his office, that’s on the same floor, an’ looked at me, proppin’ up one eyelid wi’ his forefinger. Ye know they call him the Blind Deevil, forbye he’s onythin’ but blind, an’ no deevil in his dealin’s wi’ me—McRimmon o’ the Black Bird Line.

‘“What’s here, Mister McPhee?” said he.

‘I was past prayin’ for by then. “A Chief Engineer sacked after twenty years’ service because he’ll not risk the Breslau on the new timin’, an’ be damned to ye, McRimmon,” I said.

‘The auld man sucked in his lips an’ whistled. “Ah,” said he, “the new timin’. I see! “He doddered into the Board-room I’d just left, an’ the Dandie-dog that is just his blind man’s leader stayed wi’ me. That was providential. In a minute he was back again. “Ye’ve cast your bread on the watter, M’Phee, an’ be damned to you,” he says. “Whaur’s my dog? My word, is he on your knee? There’s more discernment in a dog than a Jew. What garred ye curse your Board, McPhee? It’s expensive.”

‘“They’ll pay more for the Breslau,” I said. “Get off my knee, ye smotherin’ beastie.”

‘“Bearin’s hot, eh?” said McRimmon. “It’s thirty year since a man daur curse me to my face. Time was I’d ha’ cast ye doon the stairway for that.’

‘“Forgie’s all!” I said. He was wearin’ to eighty, as I knew. “I was wrong, McRimmon; but when a man’s shown the door for doin’ his plain duty he’s not always ceevil.”

‘“So I hear,” says McRimmon. “Ha’ ye ony objection to a tramp freighter? It’s only fifteen a month, but they say the Blind Deevil feeds a man better than others. She’s my Kite. Come ben. Ye can thank Dandie, here. I’m no used to thanks. An’ noo,” says he, “what possessed ye to throw up your berth wi’ Holdock?”

‘“The new timin’,” said I. “The Breslau will not stand it.”

‘“Hoot, oot,” said he. “Ye might ha’ crammed her a little—enough to show ye were drivin’ her—an’ brought her in twa days behind. What’s easier than to say ye slowed for bearin’s, eh? All my men do it, and—I believe ’em.”

‘“McRimmon,” says I, “what’s her virginity to a lassie?”

‘He puckered his dry face an’ twisted in his chair. “The warld an’ a’,” says he. “My God, the vara warld an’ a’! But what ha’ you or me to do wi’ virginity, this late along?”

‘“This,” I said. “There’s just one thing that each one of us in his trade or profession will not do for ony consideration whatever. If I run to time I run to time, barrin’ always the risks o’ the high. seas. Less than that, under God, I have not done. More than that, by God, I will not do! There’s no trick o’ the trade I’m not acquaint wi’——”

‘“So I’ve heard,” says McRimmon, dry as a biscuit.

‘“But yon matter o’ fair runnin’ ’s just my Shekinah, ye’ll understand. I daurna tamper wi’ that. Nursing weak engines is fair craftsmanship; but what the Board ask is cheatin’, wi’ the risk o’ manslaughter addeetional. Ye’ll note I know my business.”

‘There was some more talk, an’ next week I went aboard the Kite, twenty-five hunder ton, ordinary compound, a Black Bird tramp. The deeper she rode, the better she’d steam. I’ve snapped as much as nine out of her, but eight point three was her fair normal. Good food forward an’ better aft, all indents passed wi’out marginal remarks, the best coal, new donkeys, and good crews. There was nothin’ the old man would not do, except paint. That was his deeficulty. Ye could no more draw paint than his last teeth from him. He’d come down to dock, an’ his boats a scandal all along the watter, an’ he’d whine an’ cry an’ say they looked all he could desire. Every owner has his non plus ultra, I’ve obsairved. Paint was McRimmon’s. But you could get round his engines without riskin’ your life, an’, for all his blindness, I’ve seen him reject five flawed intermediates, one after the other, on a nod from me; an’ his cattle-fittin’s were guaranteed for North Atlantic winter weather. Ye ken what that means? McRimmon an’ the Black Bird Line, God bless him!

‘Oh, I forgot to say she would lie down an’ fill her forward deck green, an’ snore away into a twenty-knot gale forty-five to the minute, three an’ a half knots, the engines runnin’ sweet an’ true as a bairn breathin’ in its sleep. Bell was skipper; an’ forbye there’s no love lost between crews an’ owners, we were fond o’ the auld Blind Deevil an’ his dog, an’ I’m thinkin’ he liked us. He was worth the windy side o’ twa million sterling’, an’ no friend to his own blood-kin. Money’s an awfu’ thing—overmuch—for a lonely man.

‘I’d taken her out twice, there an’ back again, when word came o’ the Breslau’s breakdown, just as I prophesied. Calder was her engineer—he’s not fit to run a tug down the Solent—and he fairly lifted the engines off the bed-plates, an’ they fell down in heaps, by what I heard. So she filled from the after-stuffin’-box to the after-bulkhead, an’ lay star-gazing, with seventy-nine squealin’ passengers in the saloon, till the Camaralzaman o’ Ramsey and Gold’s Carthagena Line gave her a tow to the tune o’ five thousand seven hunder an’ forty pound, wi’ costs in the Admiralty Court. She was helpless, ye’ll understand, an’ in no case to meet ony weather. Five thousand seven hunder an’ forty pounds, with costs, an’ exclusive o’ new engines! They’d ha’ done better to ha’ kept me—on the old timin’.

‘But, even so, the new Board were all for retrenchment. Young Steiner, the Jew, was at the bottom of it. They sacked men right an’ left that would not eat the dirt the Board gave ’em. They cut down repairs; they fed crews wi’ leavin’s and scrapin’s; and, reversin’ McRimmon’s practice, they hid their defeeciencies wi’ paint an’ cheap gildin’. Quem Deus vult perrdere prrius dementat, ye remember.

‘In January we went to dry-dock, an’ in the next dock lay the Grotkau, their big freighter that was the Dolabella o’ Piegan, Piegan, and Walsh’s Line in ’84—a Clyde-built iron boat, a flat-bottomed, pigeon-breasted, under-engined, bullnosed bitch of a five thousand ton freighter, that would neither steer, nor steam, nor stop when ye asked her. Whiles she’d attend to her helm, whiles she’d take charge, whiles she’d wait to scratch herself, an’ whiles she’d buttock into a dockhead. But Holdock and Steiner had bought her cheap, and painted her all over like the Hoor o’ Babylon, an’ we called her the Hoor for short.’ (By the way, McPhee kept to that name throughout the rest of his tale; so you must read accordingly.) ‘I went to see young Bannister—he had to take what the Board gave him, an’ he an’ Calder were shifted together from the Breslau to this abortion—an’ talkin’ to him I went into the dock under her. Her plates were pitted till the men that were paint, paint, paintin’ her laughed at it. But the warst was at the last. She’d a great clumsy iron nineteen-foot Thresher propeller—Aitcheson designed the Kite’s—and just on the tail o’ the shaft, before the boss, was a red weepin’ crack ye could ha’ put a penknife to. Man, it was an awful crack!

page 4

‘“When d’ye ship a new tail-shaft?” I said to Bannister.

‘He knew what I meant. “Oh, yon’s a superfeecial flaw,” says he, not lookin’ at me.

‘“Superfeecial Gehenna!” I said. “Ye’ll not take her oot wi’ a solution o’ continuity that like.”

‘“They’ll putty it up this evening,” he said. “I’m a married man, an’—ye used to know the Board.”

‘I e’en said what was gie’d me in that hour. Ye know how a dry-dock echoes. I saw young Steiner standin’ listenin’ above me, an’, man, he used language provocative of a breach o’ the peace. I was a spy and a disgraced employé, an’ a corrupter o’ young Bannister’s morals, an’ he’d prosecute me for libel. He went away when I ran up the steps—I’d ha’ thrown him into the dock if I’d caught him—an’ there I met McRimmon, wi’ Dandie pullin’ on the chain, guidin’ the auld man among the railway lines.

‘“McPhee,” said he, “ye’re no paid to fight Holdock, Steiner, Chase, and Company, Limited, when ye meet. What’s wrong between you.”

‘“No more than a tail-shaft rotten as a kailstump. For ony sakes go and look, McRimmon. It’s a comedietta.”

‘“I’m feared o’ yon conversational Hebrew,” said he. “Whaur’s the flaw, an’ what like?”

‘“A seven-inch crack just behind the boss. There’s no power on earth will fend it just jarrin’ off.”

‘“When?”

‘“That’s beyon’ my knowledge,” I said.

‘“So it is; so it is,” said McRimmon. “We’ve all oor leemitations. Ye’re certain it was a crack?”

‘“Man, it’s a crevasse,” I said, for there were no words to describe the magnitude of it. “An’ young Bannister’s sayin’ it’s no more than a superfeecial flaw!”

‘“Weel, I tak’ it oor business is to mind oor business. If ye’ve ony friends aboard her, McPhee, why not bid them to a bit dinner at Radley’s?”

‘“I was thinkin’ o’ tea in the cuddy,” I said. “Engineers o’ tramp freighters cannot afford hotel prices.”

‘“Na! na!” says the auld man, whimperin’. “Not the cuddy. They’ll laugh at my Kite, for she’s no plastered with paint like the Hoor. Bid them to Radley’s, McPhee, an’ send me the bill. Thank Dandie; here, man. I’m no used to thanks.” Then he turned him round. (I was just thinkin’ the vara same thing.)

‘“Mister McPhee,” said he, “this is not senile dementia.”

‘“Preserve’s!” I said, clean jumped oot o’ mysel’. “I was but thinkin’ you’re fey, McRimmon.”

‘Dod, the auld deevil laughed till he nigh sat down on Dandie. “Send me the bill,” says he. “I’m lang past champagne, but tell me how it tastes the morn.”

‘Bell and I bid young Bannister and Calder to dinner at Radley’s. They’ll have no laughin’ an’ singin’ there, but we took a private room—like yacht-owners fra’ Cowes.’

McPhee grinned all over, and lay back to think.

‘And then?’ said I.

‘We were no drunk in ony preceese sense o’ the word, but Radley’s showed me the dead men. There were six magnums o’ dry champagne an’ maybe a bottle o’ whisky.’

‘Do you mean to tell me that you four got away with a magnum and a half apiece, besides whisky?’ I demanded.

McPhee looked down upon me from between his shoulders with toleration.

‘Man, we were not settin’ down to drink,’ he said. ‘They no more than made us wutty. To be sure, young Bannister laid his head on the table an’ greeted like a bairn, an’ Calder was all for callin’ on Steiner at two in the morn’ an’ painting him galley-green; but they’d been drinkin’ the afternoon. Lord, how they twa cursed the Board, an’ the Grotkau, an’ the tailshaft, an’ the engines, an’ a’! They didna talk o’ superfeecial flaws that night. I mind young Bannister an’ Calder shakin’ hands on a bond to be revenged on the Board at ony reasonable cost this side o’ losing their certificates. Now mark ye how false economy ruins business. The Board fed them like swine (I have good reason to know it), an’ I’ve obsairved wi’ my ain people that if ye touch his stomach ye wauken the deil in a Scot. Men will tak’ a dredger across the Atlantic if they’re well fed, and fetch her somewhere on the broadside o’ the Americas; but bad food’s bad service the warld over.

‘The bill went to McRimmon, an’ he said no more to me till the week-end, when I was at him for more paint, for we’d heard the Kite was chartered Liverpool-side.

‘“Bide whaur ye’re put,” said the Blind Deevil. “Man, do ye wash in champagne? The Kite’s no leavin’ here till I gie the order, an’—how am I to waste paint on her, wi’ the Lammergeyer docked for who knows how long, an’ a’!”

‘She was our big freighter—McIntyre was engineer—an’ I knew she’d come from overhaul not three months. That morn I met McRimmon’s head-clerk ye’ll not know him—fair bitin’ his nails off wi’ mortification.

‘“The auld man’s gone gyte,” says he. “He’s withdrawn the Lammergeyer.”

‘“Maybe he has reasons,” says I.

‘“Reasons! He’s daft!”

‘“He’ll no be daft till he begins to paint,” I said.

‘“That’s just what he’s done—and South American freights higher than we’ll live to see them again. He’s laid her up to paint her—to paint her—to paint her!” says the little clerk, dancin’ like a hen on a hot plate. “Five thousand ton o’ potential freight rottin’ in drydock, man; an’ he dolin’ the paint out in quarterpound tins, for it cuts him to the heart, mad though he is. An’ the Grotkau—the Grotkau of all conceivable bottoms—soaking up every pound that should be ours at Liverpool!”

page 5

‘I was staggered wi’ this folly—considerin’ the dinner at Radley’s in connection wi’ the same.

‘“Ye may well stare, McPhee,” says the headclerk. “There’s engines, an’ rollin’ stock, an’ iron bridges—d’ye know what freights are noo?—an’ pianos, an’ millinery, an’ fancy Brazil cargo o’ every species pourin’ into the Grotkau—the Grotkau o’ the Jerusalem firm—and the Lammergeyer’s bein’ painted!”

‘Losh, I thought he’d drop dead wi’ the fits.

‘I could say no more than “Obey orders, if ye break owners,” but on the Kite we believed McRimmon was mad; an’ McIntyre of the Lammergeyer was for lockin’ him up by some patent legal process he’d found in a book o’ maritime law. An’ a’ that week South American freights rose an’ rose. It was sinfu’!

‘Syne Bell got orders to tak’ the Kite round to Liverpool in water-ballast, and McRimmon came to bid’s good-bye, yammerin’ an’ whinin’ o’er the acres o’ paint he’d lavished on the Lammergeyer.

‘“I look to you to retrieve it,” says he. “I look to you to reimburse me! ’Fore God, why are ye not cast off? Are ye dawdlin’ in dock for a purpose.?”

‘“What odds, McRimmon?” says Bell. “We’ll be a day behind the fair at Liverpool. The Grotkau’s got all the freight that might ha’ been ours an’ the Lammergeyer’s.” McRimmon laughed an’ chuckled—the pairfect eemage o’ senile dementia. Ye ken his eyebrows wark up an’ down like a gorilla’s.

‘“Ye’re under sealed orders,” said he, tee-heein’ an’ scratchin’ himself. “Yon’s they”—to be opened seriatim.

‘Says Bell, shufflin’ the envelopes when the auld man had gone ashore: “We’re to creep round a’ the south coast, standin’ in for orders—this weather, too. There’s no question o’ his lunacy now.”

‘Well, we buttocked the auld Kite along—vara bad weather we made—standin’ in alongside for telegraphic orders, which are the curse o’ skippers. Syne we made over to Holyhead, an’ Bell opened the last envelope for the last instructions. I was wi’ him in the cuddy, an’ he threw it over to me, cryin’: “Did ye ever know the like, Mac?”

‘I’ll no say what McRimmon had written, but he was far from mad. There was a sou’-wester brewin’ when we made the mouth o’ the Mersey, a bitter cold morn wi’ a gray-green sea and a gray-green sky—Liverpool weather, as they say; an’ there we lay choppin’, an’ the men swore. Ye canna keep secrets aboard ship. They thought McRimmon was mad, too.

‘Syne we saw the Grotkau rollin’ oot on the top o’ flood, deep an’ double deep, wi’ her newpainted funnel an’ her new-painted boats an’ a’. She looked her name, an’, moreover, she coughed like it. Calder tauld me at Radley’s what ailed his engines, but my own ear would ha’ told me twa mile awa’, by the beat o’ them. Round we came, plungin’ an’ squatterin’ in her wake, an’ the wind cut wi’ good promise o’ more to come. By six it blew hard but clear, an’ before the middle watch it was a sou’wester in airnest.

‘“She’ll edge into Ireland, this gait,” says Bell. I was with him on the bridge, watchin’ the Grotkau’s port light. Ye canna see green so far as red, or we’d ha’ kept to leeward. We’d no passengers to consider, an’ (all eyes being on the Grotkau) we fair walked into a liner rampin’ home to Liverpool. Or, to be preceese, Bell no more than twisted the Kite oot from under her bows, and there was a little damnin’ betwix’ the twa bridges. Noo a passenger’—McPhee regarded me benignantly—‘wad ha’ told the papers that as soon as he got to the Customs. We stuck to the Grotkau’s tail that night an’ the next twa days—she slowed down to five knots by my reckonin’—and we lapped along the weary way to the Fastnet.’

‘But you don’t go by the Fastnet to get to any South American port, do you?’ I said.

‘We do not. We prefer to go as direct as may be. But we were followin’ the Grotkau, an’ she’d no walk into that gale for ony consideration. Knowin’ what I did to her discredit, I couldna blame young Bannister. It was warkin’ up to a North Atlantic winter gale, snow an’ sleet an’ a perishin’ wind. Eh, it was like the Deil walkin’ abroad o’ the surface o’ the deep, whuppin’ off the top o’ the waves before he made up his mind. They’d bore up against it so far, but the minute she was clear o’ the Skelligs she fair tucked up her skirts an’ ran for it by Dunmore Head. Wow, she rolled!

‘“She’ll be makin’ Smerwick,” says Bell.

‘“She’d ha’ tried for Ventry by noo if she meant that,” I said.

‘“They’ll roll the funnel oot o’ her, this gait,” says Bell. “Why canna Bannister keep her head to sea?”

‘“It’s the tail-shaft. Ony rollin’ ’s better than pitchin’ wi’ superfeecial cracks in the tail-shaft. Calder knows that much,” I said.

‘“It’s ill wark retreevin’ steamers this weather,” said Bell. His beard and whiskers were frozen to his oilskin, an’ the spray was white on the weather side of him. Pairfect North Atlantic winter weather!

‘One by one the sea raxed away our three boats, an’ the davits were crumpled like rams’ horns.

‘“Yon’s bad,” said Belt, at the last. “Ye canna pass a hawser wi’oot a boat.” Bell was a vara judeecious man—for an Aberdonian.

‘I’m not one that fashes himself for eventualities outside the engine-room, so I e’en slipped down betwixt waves to see how the Kite fared. Man, she’s the best geared boat of her class that ever left the Clyde! Kinloch, my second, knew her as well as I did. I found him dryin’ his socks on the main steam, an’ combin’ his whiskers wi’ the comb Janet gied me last year, for the warld an’ a’ as though we were in port. I tried the feed, speered into the stoke-hole, thumbed all bearin’s, spat on the thrust for luck, gied ’em my blessin’, an’ took Kinloch’s socks before I went up to the bridge again.

‘Then Bell handed me the wheel, an’ went below to warm himself. When he came up my gloves were frozen to the spokes, an’ the ice clicked over my eyelids. Pairfect North Atlantic winter weather, as I was sayin’.

‘The gale blew out by night, but we lay in smotherin’ cross-seas that made the auld Kite chatter from stem to stern. I slowed to thirty-four, I mind—no, thirty-seven. There was a long swell the morn, an’ the Grotkau was headin’ into it west awa’.

‘“She’ll win to Rio yet, tail-shaft or no tailshaft,” says Bell.

‘“Last night shook her,” I said. “She’ll jar it off yet, mark my word.”

page 6

‘We were then, maybe, a hunder and fifty mile west-sou’west o’ Slyne Head, by dead reckonin’. Next day we made a hunder an’ thirty—ye’ll note we were not racin’ boats—an’ the day after a hunder and sixty-one, an’ that made us, we’ll say, Eighteen an’ a bittock west, an’ maybe Fifty-one an’ a bittock north, crossin’ all the North Atlantic liner lanes on the long slant, always in sight o’ the Grotkau, creepin’ up by night and fallin’ awa’ by day. After the gale, it was cold weather wi’ dark nights.

‘I was in the engine-room on Friday night, just before the middle watch, when Bell whustled doon the tube: “She’s done it”; an’ up I came.

‘The Grotkau was just a fair distance south, an’ one by one she ran up the three red lights in a vertical line – the sign of a steamer not under control.

‘“Yon’s a tow for us,” said Bell, lickin’ his chops. “She’ll be worth more than the Breslau. We’ll go down to her, McPhee! “

‘“Bide a while,” I said. “The sea’s fair throng wi’ ships here.”

‘“Reason why,” said Bell. “It’s a fortune gaun beggin’. What d’ye think, man?”

‘“Gie her till daylight. She knows we’re here. If Bannister needs help he’ll loose a rocket.”

‘“Wha told ye Bannister’s need? We’ll ha’ some rag-an’-bone tramp snappin’ her up under oor nose,” said he; an’ he put the wheel over. We were gaun slow.

‘“Bannister wad like better to go home on a liner an’ eat in the saloon. Mind ye what they said o’ Holdock and Steiner’s food that night at Radley’s? Keep her awa’, man—keep her awa’. A tow’s a tow, but a derelict’s big salvage.”

‘“E-eh!” said Bell. “Yon’s an inshot o’ yours, Mac. I love ye like a brother. We’ll bide whaur we are till daylight”; an’ he kept her awa’.

‘Syne up went a rocket forward, an’ twa on the bridge, an’ a blue light aft. Syne a tar-barrel forward again.

‘“She’s sinkin’,” said Bell. “It’s all gaun, an’ I’ll get no more than a pair o’ night-glasses for pickin’ up young Bannister—the fool!”

‘“Fair an’ soft again,” I said. “She’s signallin’ to the south of us. Bannister knows as well as I that one rocket would bring the Kite. He’ll no be wastin’ fireworks for nothin’. Hear her ca’!”

‘The Grotkau whustled. an’ whustled for five minutes, an’ then there were more fireworks—a regular exhibeetion.

‘“That’s no for men in the regular trade,” says Bell. “Ye’re right, Mac. That’s for a cuddy full o’ passengers.” He blinked through the nightglasses where it lay a bit thick to southward.

‘“What d’ye make of it? “I said.

‘“Liner,” he says. “Yon’s her rocket. Ou, ay; they’ve waukened the gold-strapped skipper, an’—noo they’ve waukened the passengers. They’re turnin’ on the electrics, cabin by cabin. Yon’s anither rocket. They’re comin’ up to help the perishin’ in deep watters.”

‘“Gie me the glass,” I said. But Bell danced on the bridge, clean dementit. “Mails—mails—mails!” said he. “Under contract wi’ the Government for the due conveyance o’ the mails; an’ as such, Mac, ye’ll note, she may rescue life at sea, but she canna tow!—she canna tow! Yon’s her night-signal. She’ll be up in half an hour!”

“Gowk! “I said, “an’ we blazin’ here wi’ all oor lights. Oh, Bell, but ye’re a fool.”

‘He tumbled off the bridge forward, an’ I tumbled aft, an’ before ye could wink our lights were oot, the engine-room hatch was covered, an’ we lay pitch-dark, watchin’ the lights o’ the liner come up that the Grotkau ’d been signallin’ for. Twenty knot she came, every cabin lighted, an’ her boats swung awa’. It was grandly done, an’ in the inside of an hour. She stopped like Mrs. Holdock’s machine; doon went the gangway, doon went the boats, an’ in ten minutes we heard the passengers cheerin’, an’ awa’ she fled.

‘“They’ll tell o’ this all the days they live,” said Bell. “A rescue at sea by night, as pretty as a play. Young Bannister an’ Calder will be drinkin’ in the saloon, an’ six months hence the Board o’ Trade ’ll gie the skipper a pair o’ binoculars. It’s vara philanthropic all round.”

‘We lay by till day—ye may think we waited for it wi’ sore eyes—an’ there sat the Grotkau, her nose a bit cocked, just leerin’ at us. She looked pairfectly rideeculous.

‘“She’ll be fillip’ aft,” says Bell; “for why is she doon by the stern? The tail-shaft’s punched a hole in her, an’-we’ve no boats. There’s three hunder thousand pound sterlin’, at a conservative estimate, droonin’ before our eyes. What’s to do?” An’ his bearin’s got hot again in a minute; for he was an incontinent man.

‘“Run her as near as ye daur,” I said: “Gie me a jacket an’ a life-line, an’ I’ll swum for it.” There was a bit lump of a sea, an’ it was cold in the wind—vara cold; but they’d gone overside like passengers, young Bannister an’ Calder an’ a’, leaving the gangway doon on the lee-side. It would ha’ been a flyin’ in the face o’ manifest Providence to overlook the invitation. We were within fifty yards o’ her while Kinloch was garmin’ me all over wi’ oil behind the galley; an’ as we ran past I went outboard for the salvage o’ three hunder thousand pound. Man, it was perishin’ cold, but I’d done my job judgmatically, an’ came scrapin’ all along her side slap on to the lower gratin’ o’ the gangway. No one more astonished than me, I assure ye. Before I’d caught my breath I’d skinned both my knees on the gratin’, an’ was climbin’ up before she rolled again. I made my line fast to the rail, an’ squattered aft to young Bannister’s cabin, whaur I dried me wi’ everything in his bunk, an’ put on every conceivable sort o’ rig I found till the blood was circulatin’. Three pair drawers, I mind I found—to begin upon—an’ I needed them all. It was the coldest cold I remember in all my experience.

‘Syne I went aft to the engine-room. The Grotkau sat on her own tail, as they say. She was vara short-shafted, an’ her gear was all aft. There was four or five foot o’ watter in the engine-room slummockin’ to and fro, black an’ greasy; maybe there was six foot., The stokehold doors were screwed home, an’ the stokehold was tight enough; but for a minute the mess in the engine-room deceived me. Only for a minute, though, an’ that was because I was not, in a manner o’ speakin’, as calm as ordinar’. I looked again to mak’ sure. ’Twas just black wi’ bilge: dead watter that must ha’ come in fortuitously, ye ken.’

‘McPhee, I’m only a passenger,’ I said, ‘but you don’t persuade me that six foot o’ water can come into an engine-room fortuitously.’

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‘Wha’s tryin’ to persuade one way or the other?’ McPhee retorted. ‘I’m statin’ the facts o’ the case—the simple, natural facts. Six or seven foot o’ dead watter in the engine-room is a vara depressin’ sight if ye think there’s like to be more comin’; but I did not consider that such was likely, and so, ye’ll note, I was not depressed.’

‘That’s all very well, but I want to know about the water,’ I said.

‘I’ve told ye. There was six feet or more there, wi’ Calder’s cap floatin’ on top.’

‘Where did it come from?’

‘Weel, in the confusion o’ things after the propeller had dropped off an’ the engines were racin’ an’ a’, it’s vara possible that Calder might ha’ lost it off his head an’ no troubled himself to pick it up again. I remember seein’ that cap on him at Southampton.’

‘I don’t want to know about the cap. I’m asking where the water came from, and what it was doing there, and why you were so certain that it wasn’t a leak, McPhee?’

‘For good reason—for good an’ sufficient reason.’

‘Give it to me, then.’

‘Weel, it’s a reason that does not properly concern myself only. To be preceese, I’m of opinion that it was due, the watter, in part to an error o’ judgment in another man. We can a’ mak’ mistakes.’

‘Oh, I beg your pardon! Go on.

‘I got me to the rail again, an’, “What’s wrang?” said Bell, hailin’.

‘“She’ll do,” I said. “Send’s o’er a hawser, an’ a man to help steer. I’ll pull him in by the life-line.”

‘I could see heads bobbin’ back an’ forth, an’ a whuff or two o’ strong words. Then Bell said: “They’ll not trust themselves—one of ’em—in this watter—except Kinloch, an’ I’ll no spare him.”

‘“The more salvage to me, then,” I said. “I’ll make shift solo.”

‘Says one dock-rat at this: “D’ye think she’s safe?’

‘“I’ll guarantee ye nothing,” I said, “except, maybe, a hammerin’ for keepin’ me this long.”

‘Then he sings out: “There’s no more than one life-belt, an’ they canna find it, or I’d come.”

‘“Throw him over, the Jezebel,” I said, for I was oot o’ patience; an’ they took haud o’ that volunteer before he knew what was in store, and hove him over in the bight of the life-line. So I e’en hauled him up on the sag of it, hand-over-fist—a vara welcome recruit when I’d tilted the salt watter oot of him; for, by the way, he could not swum.

‘Syne they bent a twa-inch rope to the life-line, an’ a hawser to that, an’ I led the rope o’er the drum of a hand-winch forward, an’ we sweated the hawser inboard an’ made it fast to the Grotkau’s bitts.

‘Bell brought the Kite so close I feared she’d roll in an’ do the Grotkau’s plates a mischief. He hove anither life-line to me, an’ went astern, an’ we had all the weary winch-work to do again wi’ a second hawser. For all that, Bell was right: we’d a long tow before us, an’ though Providence had helped us that far, there was no sense in leavin’ too much to its keepin’. When the second hawser was fast, I was wet wi’ sweat, an’ I cried Bell to tak’ up his slack an’ go home. The other man was by way o’ helpin’ the work wi’ askin’ for drinks, but I e’en told him he must hand reef an’ steer, beginnin’ with steerin’, for I was goin’ to turn in. He steered—ou, ay, he steered, in a manner o’ speakin’. At the least, he grippit the spokes an’ twiddled ’em an’ looked wise, but I doubt if the Hoor ever felt it. I turned in there an’ then to young Bannister’s bunk, an’ slept past expression. I waukened ragin’ wi’ hunger, a fair lump o’ sea runnin’, the Kite snorin’ awa’ four knots; an’ the Grotkau slappin’ her nose under, an’ yawin’ an’ standin’ over at discretion. She was a most disgracefu’ tow. But the shameful thing of all was the food. I raxed me a meal fra galley-shelves an’ pantries an’ lazareetes an’ cubbyholes that I would not ha’ gied to the mate of a Cardiff collier; an’ ye ken we say a Cardiff mate will eat clinkers to save waste. I’m sayin’ it was simply vile! The crew had written what they thought of it on the new paint o’ the fo’c’sle, but I had not a decent soul wi’ me to complain on.

There was nothing’ for me to do save watch the hawsers an’ the Kite’s tail squatterin’ down in white watter when she lifted to a sea; so I got steam on the after donkey-pump, an’ pumped oot the engineroom. There’s no sense in leavin’ watter loose in a ship. When she was dry, I went doon the shaft-tunnel, an’ found she was leakin’ a little through the stuffin’-box, but nothin’ to make wark. The propeller had e’en jarred off, as I knew it must, an’ Calder had been waitin’ for it to go wi’ his hand on the gear. He told me as much when I met him ashore. There was nothin’ started or strained. It had just slipped awa’ to the bed o’ the Atlantic as easy as a man dyin’ wi’ due warnin’—a most providential business for all concerned. Syne I took stock o’ the Grotkau’s upper works. Her boats had been smashed on the davits, an’ here an’ there was the rail missin’, an’ a ventilator or two had fetched awa’, an’ the bridge-rails were bent by the seas; but her hatches were tight, and she’d taken no sort of harm. Dod, I came to hate her like a human bein’, for I was eight weary days aboard, starvin’—ay, starvin’—within a cable’s length o’ plenty. All day I lay in the bunk reading the Woman-Hater, the grandest book Charlie Reade ever wrote, an’ pickin’ a toothful here an’ there. It was weary, weary work. Eight days, man, I was aboard the Grotkau, an’ not one full meal did I make. Sma’ blame her crew would not stay by her. The other man? Oh, I warked him to keep him crack. I warked him wi’ a vengeance.

‘It came on to blow when we fetched soundin’s, an’ that kept me standin’ by the hawsers, lashed to the capstan, breathin’ betwixt green seas. I near died o’ cauld an’ hunger, for the Grotkau towed like a barge, an’ Bell howkit her along through or over. It was vara thick up-Channel, too. We were standin’ in to make some sort o’ light, and we near walked over twa three fishin’-boats, an’ they cried us we were o’er close to Falmouth. Then we were near cut down by a drunken foreign fruiter that was blunderin’ between us an’ the shore, and it got thicker and thicker that night, an’ I could feel by the tow Bell did not know whaur he was. Losh, we knew in the morn, for the wind blew the fog oot like a candle, an’ the sun came clear; and as surely as McRimmon gied me my cheque, the shadow o’ the Eddystone lay across our tow-rope! We were that near—ay, we were that near! Bell fetched the Kite round with a jerk that came close to tearin’ the bitts out o’ the Grotkau; an’ I mind I thanked my Maker in young Bannister’s cabin when we were inside Plymouth breakwater.

‘The first to come aboard was McRimmon, wi’ Dandie. Did I tell you our orders were to take anything found into Plymouth? The auld deil had just come down overnight, puttin’ two an’ two together from what Calder had told him when the liner landed the Grotkau’s men. He had preceesely hit oor time. I’d hailed Bell for something to eat, an’ he sent it o’er in the same boat wi’ McRimmon, when the auld man came to me. He grinned an’ slapped his legs and worked his eyebrows the while I ate.

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‘“How do Holdock, Steiner, and Chase feed their men?” said he.

‘“Ye can see,” I said, knockin’ the top off another beer-bottle. “I did not take to be starved, McRimmon.”

‘“Nor to swim, either,” said he, for Bell had tauld him how I carried the line aboard. “Well, I’m thinkin’ you’ll be no loser. What freight could we ha’ put into the Lammergeyer would equal salvage on four hunder thousand pounds—hull and cargo? Eh, McPhee? This cuts the liver out o’ Holdock, Steiner, Chase, and Company, Limited. Eh, McPhee? An’ I’m sufferin’ from senile dementia now? Eh, McPhee? An’ I’m not daft, am I, till I begin to paint the Lammergeyer? Eh, McPhee? Ye may weel lift your leg, Dandie! I ha’ the laugh o’ them all. Ye found watter in the engine-room?”

‘“To speak wi’oot prejudice,” I said, “there was some watter.”

‘“They thought she was sinkin’ after the propeller went. She filled with extraordinary rapeedity. Calder said it grieved him an’ Bannister to abandon her.”

‘I thought o’ the dinner at Radley’s, an’ what like o’ food I’d eaten for eight days.

‘“It would grieve them sore,” I said.

‘“But the crew would not hear o’ stayin’ an’ takin’ their chances. They’re gaun up an’ down sayin’ they’d ha’ starved first.”

‘“They’d ha’ starved if they’d stayed,” said I.

‘“I tak’ it, fra Calder’s account, there was a mutiny a’most.”

‘“Ye know more than I, McRimmon,” I said. “Speakin’ wi’oot prejudice, for we’re all in the same boat, who opened the bilge-cock?”

‘“Oh, that’s it—is it?” said the auld man, an’ I could see he was surprised. “A bilge-cock, ye say?”

‘“I believe it was a bilge-cock. They were all shut when I came aboard, but someone had flooded the engine-room eight feet over all, and shut it off with the worm-an’-wheel gear from the second gratin’ afterwards.”

‘“Losh!” said McRimmon. “The ineequity o’ man’s beyond belief. But it’s awfu’ discreditable to Holdock, Steiner, and Chase, if that came oot in court.”

‘“It’s just my own curiosity,” I said.

‘“Aweel, Dandie’s afflicted wi’ the same disease. Dandie, strive against curiosity, for it brings a little dog into traps an’ suchlike. Whaur was the Kite when yon painted liner took off the Grotkau’s people? “

‘“Just there or thereabouts,” I said.

‘“An’ which o’ you twa thought to cover your lights? “said he, winkin’.

‘“Dandie,” I said to the dog, “we must both strive against curiosity. It’s an unremunerative business. What’s our chance o’ salvage, Dandie?”

‘He laughed till he choked. “Tak’ what I gie you, McPhee, an’ be content,” he said. “Lord, how a man wastes time when he gets old. Get aboard the Kite, mon, as soon as ye can. I’ve clean forgot there’s a Baltic charter yammerin’ for you at London. That’ll be your last voyage, I’m thinkin’, excep’ by way o’ pleasure.”

‘Steiner’s men were comin’ aboard to take charge an’ tow her round, an’ I passed young Steiner in a boat as I went to the Kite. He looked down his nose; but McRimmon pipes up: “Here’s the man ye owe the Grotkau to—at a price, Steiner—at a price! Let me introduce Mister McPhee to you. Maybe ye’ve met before; but ye’ve vara little luck in keeping your men—ashore or afloat!”

‘Young Steiner looked angry enough to eat him as he chuckled an’ whustled in his dry old throat.

‘“Ye’ve not got your award yet,” Steiner says.

‘“Na, na,” says the auld man, in a screech ye could hear to the Hoe, “but I’ve twa million sterlin’, an’ no bairns, ye Judeeas Apella, if ye mean to fight; an’ I’ll match ye p’und for p’und till the last p’und’s oot. Ye ken me, Steiner? I’m McRimmon o’ McNaughton and McRimmon!”

‘“Dod,” he said betwix’ his teeth, sittin’ back in the boat, “I’ve waited fourteen year to break that Jew-firm, an’ God be thankit I’ll do it now.”

‘The Kite was in the Baltic while the auld man was warkin his warks, but I know the assessors valued the Grotkau, all told, at over three hunder and sixty thousand—her manifest was a treat o’ richness—and McRimmon got a third for salvin’ an abandoned ship. Ye see, there’s vast deeference between towin’ a ship wi’ men on her and pickin’ up a derelict—a vast deeference—in pounds sterlin’. Moreover, twa—three o’ the Grotkau’s crew were burnin’ to testify about food, an’ there was a note o’ Calder to the Board in regard to the tail-shaft that would ha’ been vara damagin’ if it had come into court. They knew better than to fight.

‘Syne the Kite came back, and McRimmon paid off me an’ Bell personally, and the rest of the crew pro rata, I believe it’s ca’ed. My share—oor share, I should say—was just twenty-five thousand pounds sterlin’.’

At this point Janet jumped up and kissed him.

‘Five-and-twenty thousand pound sterlin’. Noo, I’m fra the North, and I’m not the like to fling money awa’ rashly, but I’d gie six months’ pay—one hunder an twenty pound—to know who flooded the engine-room of the Grotkau. I’m fairly well acquaint wi’ McRimmon’s eediosyncrasies, and he’d no hand in it. It was not Calder, for I’ve asked him, an’ he wanted to fight me. It would be in the highest degree unprofessional o’ Calder—not fightin’, but openin’ bilge-cocks—but for a while I thought it was him. Ay, I judged it might be him—under temptation.,

‘What’s your theory?’ I demanded.

‘Weel, I’m inclined to think it was one o’ those singular providences that remind us we’re in the hands o’ Higher Powers.’

‘It couldn’t open and shut itself?’

‘I did not mean that; but some half-starvin’ oiler or, maybe, trimmer must ha’ opened it a while to mak’ sure o’ leavin’ the Grotkau. It’s a demoralisin’ thing to see an engine-room flood up after any accident to the gear—demoralisin’ and deceptive both. Aweel, the man got what he wanted, for they went aboard the liner cryin’ that the Grotkau was sinkin’. But it’s curious to think o’ the consequences. In a’ human probability, he’s bein’ damned in heaps at the present moment aboard another tramp-freighter; an’ here am I, wi’ five-an’-twenty thousand pounds invested, resolute to go to sea no more—providential’s the preceese word—except as a passenger, ye’ll understand, Janet.’

McPhee kept his word. He and Janet went for a voyage as passengers in the first-class saloon. They paid seventy pounds for their berths; and Janet found a very sick woman in the second-class saloon, so that for sixteen days she lived below, and chatted with the stewardesses at the foot of the second-saloon stairs while her patient slept. McPhee was a passenger for exactly twenty-four hours. Then the engineers’ mess—where the oilcloth tables are–joyfully took him to its bosom, and for the rest of the voyage that company was richer by the unpaid services of a highly certificated engineer.