s a slump in mortality.

In those old, far-distant Chilworth Street days, two men who engaged in a
battle to the death about a woman desired might have seemed merely savages
to Saxham. Here things are different. The elemental bed-rock of human
nature has been laid bare, and the grim, naked scars upon it, testifying
to the combat of Ice and Fire for the round world's supremacy, will never
be quite hidden under Civilisation's green mantle of vegetation, or her
toadstool-growths of bricks and mortar, any more.

And the men are well matched. Saxham knows himself the more muscular, but
Beauvayse has the advantage of him in years, and is lithe, and strong, and
supple as the Greek wrestler who served the sculptor Polycleitos as a
model for the Athlete with the Diadem.

It will be a fight worth having. No quarter. And Saxham's breath comes
heavily, and his blue eyes have in them a steely glitter, and, as the
tarpaulin falls behind him, he shifts to a better grip on the strong old
hunting-crop.

Overhead the rain drums deafeningly on the tarpaulins. The long bombproof
is heterogeneously furnished with full and empty ammunition-boxes marked
A.O.S., a leathern sofa-divan, tattered by spurs and marked by muddy
boots, several cane or canvas deck-chairs, and others of the Windsor
pattern common to the barrack-room. Arms and accoutrements are in rude
racks against the corrugated-iron-panelled walls; a trestle-table covered
with oilcloth runs down the middle. It is lighted by a couple of acetylene
lamps hanging by their chains from iron bars that cross the trench above,
and there is another lamp, green-shaded, upon a bare deal table that
stands, strewn with papers, against the farther wall.

A man in shirt-sleeves sits there writing. Another man is busy at a
telephone that is fixed against the wall beyond the writing-table. There
is something fateful and ominous about the heavy silence in which they do
their work. It is broken only by a strange sound that comes almost
continuously from--where Saxham does not trouble to ask. It is the
groaning, undoubtedly, of the wounded man to whose aid he has been
summoned, with the added injunction, "Bring morphia," showing that little
further can be done for him, whoever he may be, than to smooth his
passage into the Beyond by the aid of the Pain Slayer.

Let him wait, however sore his need, until Saxham has dealt with his
enemy. He is resentfully impatient in the knowledge that neither of the